Aunt Wodehouse Pays a Visit
by AMarguerite
Summary: When your printer is arrested, your royalist aunt is coming for a visit and your best friend declares that he is dying of love or cholera and has challenged a Russian hussar to a duel, it is a bad day to be a revolutionary, or a normal one to be Bossuet.
1. Chapter 1

It is never easy being a republican revolutionary while living in an absolute monarchy and for Bossuet, who never caught any of the lucky breaks his fellow revolutionaries did when it came to arriving on time to exams, having pocket money or not getting hit by gendarmes who did not believe in freedom of assembly, it was certainly going to get harder. He was not an optimist by nature; he viewed the world with a slightly sardonic detachment and the constant assumption that Fate Was a Bitch and he expected to never succeed at anything. To that end, he had lost his familial property (unwise speculation cost him the farm land, and an attempt at putting up a lightening rod on the house had, ironically, caused the house to get hit by lightening, catch on fire and burn down), his apartment (his landlady was not happy to find illegal republican newspapers behind her Fragonard prints), his money (Bossuet had since forsworn cards, the stock market, business affairs, horse races, dominos, masked balls, cut-purse prostitutes and eating in cafés), and any hope of passing the bar within the next five years. This was not the worst fate he could imagine, since it meant loafing around Paris doing nothing but occasionally signing his name on the attendance record, but it did entail receiving mail.

He dreaded the arrival of his mail with the sort of paranoid distrust of the universe that his dearest friend and now roommate Joly had when it came to health and the human body. _Something _was bound to go wrong and that _something _would probably be at his expense. Bossuet therefore made a great production of opening his mail by taking it to the backroom of the Café Musain. With the air of one of Racine's heroes, Bossuet would thrust out the letters to Courfeyrac who, being at heart a paladin, was always happy to be of service. Since Courfeyrac liked to indulge in extremes of emotion, he entered into Bossuet's self-parody with relish.

Bossuet therefore skipped his lecture for the day and went into the back room of the Café Musain by the back way, up the private stairway on the Rue des Gres. He was fortunate enough to find Courfeyrac drinking coffee with Combeferre.

"Ah, the dread messenger has arrived!" announced Courfeyrac, immediately breaking off his debate with Combeferre over what constituted a legal manifestation of the will of the people. Bossuet assumed that Courfeyrac had been losing but, since it meant a. that Bossuet would not have to open his mail himself and b. Bossuet could, in some small measure, help a dear friend, Bossuet thrust out the letters at once. "That's why you skipped the tort lecture today!"

"_You _are skipping the tort lecture too," Combeferre pointed out. To emphasize his disapproval, Combeferre took off his glasses and began polishing them with his pocket handkerchief.

Courfeyrac squirmed in his seat. "Yeees, technically, but Enjolras already took the class and give me his notes and—Bossuet, my dear fellow, two letters? You must be faint with terror!"

"My brow and my bald spot are as pale as the parchment before me," Bossuet announced dramatically. "I felt it the moment I walked into Joly's apartment and saw wax seals on the end table in the hallway. Joly was out attending Saint-Hilaire's lesson on the carotid artery—"

"My favorite lecture!" exclaimed Combeferre.

"—so I cannot tell you how much time passed—"

"Why do you need Joly to tell time?" asked Combeferre.

"I lost my pocket watch to Grantaire," Bossuet explained, mildly irritated. He had been getting into his monologue, dragging out each syllable to the point where he started pronouncing even the ones that ought to have been silent. Bossuet reflected that he had been about to give a performance Talma would have applauded if Lady Luck had not decided that he had not been pummeled enough that day and had subjected him to Combeferre while in a more extroverted temper than usual. "As it turns out, he can drink two bottles of absinthe without passing out and I still owe Jehan ten francs. _However_, I cannot tell you how much time passed, except that I saw the whole of my wretched existence and knew it to be at an end! With the last of my fading strength—" Bossuet grabbed a chair from an empty table and collapsed into it "—I rushed over here. Oh spare me my cruel fate!"

"Alas, I cannot stop the fall of Damocles' sword, but I can try to catch it and…." Courfeyrac trailed off and frowned. Though he had the eloquence of Demosthenes when placed in a courtroom, metaphors still occasionally eluded him. This irritated Courfeyrac even more than the fact that damp weather made his Romantic curls frizz up into something more befitting a gorgon than the dandy he aspired to be.

"Fling it into a nonvital part of his body?" suggested Combeferre, who, did not possess a poetic temperament, either, but was not bothered by it.

"Where is Jehan when you need him?" asked Courfeyrac. "Bad luck, that. Well, if Baron Pontmercy is not to shaken by his run-in with logic and the Republic, I shall beg him for help. Marius writes poetry in between doing his translations, but I think the translations sell better than the poetry. His style is too romantic to be commercially successful, as any true poetry ought to be. Let me see?" He held out his hand with an unconscious flourish that reminded Bossuet that Courfeyrac had a particle before his name and an ancestral home that dated back to Francois Ier.

Bossuet tossed the letters to Courfeyrac, who broke the seals on each of them and skimmed through them. Bossuet never knew if Courfeyrac really understood, as Joly did, how much Bossuet really did dread opening his letters, or if he had just started opening Bossuet's correspondence because it was something to do when there was no more wine and Combeferre once again could not be provoked into losing his temper.

"Be not alarmed, the first is from your uncle Jacques Dupont," said Courfeyrac, "thanking you for the legal advice and for confirming that his lawyer was not trying to cheat him. I have spared you the excess punctuation, as I doubt you would enjoy this very provincial garnish, but, alas, his thanks comes only in this form, and the observation that it must be extremely difficult to be a lawyer since there is so much to know!"

"And none of it examined very strenuously," replied Bossuet. "Still, I have yet to take the required number of courses to be eligible for my license, though I doubt they are necessary to pass the bar. What of the next one?"

"Euh…." Courfeyrac frowned. "Not quite so… oh lord, you have one of _those _aunts."

"Aunt Agathe Wodehouse?" asked Bossuet. "She wrote me a letter? She was supposed to be in America… no, her husband died two years ago, now that I think about it, and she moved back to France. I got enough from his will to attend enough classes to pass my first year of law school. Well, hello Guignon, old luck. It has been two days since you took the form of a bored pugilist out for my blood. Perhaps you had just better read the whole thing aloud, Courfeyrac."

"You will not take some anesthetic?" asked Combeferre, deftly removing Courfeyac's hipflask and pushing it towards Bossuet.

"You had better follow our doctor's advice here," said Courfeyrac, looking up from the letter with a comforting smile. "I have an aunt like that too, Aunt Mathilde, she who nibbles on broken glass when she feels peckish and who kills rats with her teeth. When I was misbehaving as a child, my parents would threaten to send me to stay with Aunt Mathilde." Courfeyrac shuddered histrionically. "I still await the day when my father asks me why I mean to go for a doctorate in law if I never go to any lectures and threatens to send Aunt Mathilde to check on me."

"My Aunt Agathe is… not going to… check up on me, is she?" asked Bossuet, so startled by this round of bad luck he could not keep up his attitude of good cheer.

"Oh, my poor little eagle," said Courfeyrac. "She certainly is." He tilted his chair back on two legs and read the following:

_To my nephew Legles:_

_My brother Georges has informed me that you have at last put your education to some use and have provided him with sound legal advice. He also noted that since your father's house burned down you are without funds of your own, and had to pay sixty francs (highway robbery!) for each class. It is no wonder that you have yet to pass the bar. It is not, as I thought, merely an indication of your laziness and your father's peasant blood, though _I _never said my dear sister had married beneath her. It is merely because Paris is expensive, as Boston is more expensive than Springfield. _

_No longer having children of my own, and no patience for the whining, sticky-faced creatures my late husband's sister passes off as my nieces and nephews, though _I _would never call them such_, _I am determined to come up to Paris and see if you are worthy of assistance. I will arrive…._

Courfeyrac trailed off. "Oo. She arrived today. La de da, posh address near the Luxembourg Gardens and more instruction:

_Do not attempt to visit me. The porter will certainly send you away as a vagabond, since I have _seen _what some of the students at Harvard wear and it is enough to cast aspersions on the parenthood of a Lee of Virginia, though _I _would never say something like that, and your bloodline is not nearly as good_. _Write to me before the week is out, or I shall not count you as a member of the deserving poor._

_Sincerely,_

_Mme Bertram Wodehouse_

Bossuet opened Courfeyrac's hipflask and drank.

"I have never liked the phrase, 'deserving poor'," Combeferre said, to break the silence. "How can one judge whether or not someone is deserving?"

"I know how Aunt Agathe will," said Bossuet. "Am I a good Catholic Royalist, not plotting the overthrow of the government and not sharing chambers with a medical student convinced he will die if his bed points east? At least Joly's father is a fonctionnaire, even if his grandfather was a watchmaker. I never thought _I _would say it, but Bonaparte was good for something."

"Do you even know the name of any churches?" asked Courfeyrac.

"… St. Petersburg?"

"That was truly impressive," said Courfeyrac, after a moment's stunned admiration.

"I would say 'good luck'," added Combeferre, "but, as much as I hate to credit luck with anything, I would say that this endeavor seems… doomed to unequivocal failure. At least you have us to help you write a reply."

"What, and actually _see _Aunt Agathe? I would prefer to have my doom in a written form that can be flung onto the fire and burned out of my memory instead of said doom being not-quite-shouted at me from across the dinner table, though of course _she _never said anything about it!" He scratched his balding head. "At the same time… Aunt Agathe has a widow's jointure that makes the gross national product of Poland look like Feuilly's income and my pockets are out to let…."

Bossuet's income came mostly from relatives who liked to say they had a nephew/ cousin/ grand-nephew taking studying to be a lawyer in _Paris_ and who had no idea that to be a practicing lawyer, one only needed two years at university, or, as one of Courfeyrac's friends had done when his savings ran out, a week spent cramming to pass the bar. Bossuet had spent five years at law school without ever bothering to take the bar exam, since he could never interest himself enough in attending the requisite number of classes. It was much more fun to stay in a café and debate the Rights of Man and Citizen than go off and learn how to correctly file an appeal in a law court that was corrupt and arbitrary anyways.

Upon receiving the generous donations of his relations, Bossuet tended to spend it all within a month. If Joly was around to open his letters, Bossuet would pay his tabs at all the cafes, bookshops, boulangeries, etc. that he patronized and then get thoroughly drunk on the rest; if Courfeyrac opened his letters, Bossuet would wake up about a week later with an empty pocket, a hangover, vague memories of how he had spent the past seven days and the certainty that he had enjoyed himself immensely and simply _had _to do it again when Uncle Moreau's check cleared. To fulfill his day-to-day requirements, Bossuet made very bad translations of English articles for French newspapers and very good copies for anyone willing to hire him. Since Joly, his particular friend, had a father who was a fonctionnaire, Bossuet always knew he had someplace to stay, someone to cheerfully invite him to dine and a friend who, though fake-scolding him about it, would lend him whatever sum he needed badly enough to borrow off of someone. Though Bossuet honestly saw a life of borrowing off of Joly as his realistic option for the future, it was oddly appealing to think he might, whenever he wished, yank the magnets from Joly's hands, announce that they were going to the Comédie Française to heckle the classicists and then hire a box where they could hiss at the members of the Académie Française at will. Or rather, Bossuet would. Joly would probably be overcome by giggles and, completely ignoring the point of the theatre, focus on what was happening onstage. Joly had an odd susceptibility to Moliere. Bossuet mentally revised his plans to include Bahorel and Courfeyrac, so as to have the pleasure of hissing at the classicists in three-part harmony.

"It cannot be as bad as you are making it out to be," Bossuet said.

"If your Aunt Agathe is anything like my Aunt Mathilde then yes, yes it will be," said Courfeyrac. "Do you remember when you actually had a decent coat, and I invited you as part of a group of… oh, what was the phrase, _jeunes charmants_, to go to my Aunt Therese's ball? Do you remember how, after you lost a game of cards, a wrinkled old harpy sniffed and said that gambling was the first step on the road to hell and then, when you said something quite witty that I have entirely forgotten, just as I have forgotten the location of my hat, she harangued you for an hour?"

"I also dropped the punchbowl on her pug," pointed out Bossuet. "She had reason to be angry with me."

"Not to the point where she attempted to baptize you with that same punchbowl in private. And remember, Bossuet, old fellow, your aunt has been living in Chateaubriand's America, where the force of the elements and the Puritan legacy has no doubt strengthened her voice and hardened her yet further against your degenerate bohemian lifestyle."

"Still," said Bossuet, nerving himself enough to pick up the letter and look at it himself. "If I do nothing, Aunt Agathe will tell the rest of my relatives not to bother helping me and I will have to find a _job._"

"What a dreadful situation, Legles," Courfeyrac said, with a wince. "I always hate to be the bearer of bad news."

"I bear worse," Feuilly said, coming in and locking the door behind him. He lowered his voice. "Our printer's been arrested."

"What?" asked Courfeyrac, the legs of his chair abruptly coming into contact with the floor. "He hasn't…?"

"No, not as far as I know. Enjolras is trying to finagle his way into being our printer's legal representative since he has passed the bar." Feuilly took off his cap and scratched his head. "It's enough to make one think of the violent seizure of Poland—"

"Yes, but what charges?" asked Bossuet, who had no interest in Poland at this particular moment, sad though it was that Poland was being forever partitioned.

"I have no idea," said Feuilly. "And besides, Enjolras told me that it was not… an entirely sure thing that they will give our printer a trial."

Courfeyrac took the moment to swear so creatively all the rest of them felt impressed by his hitherto unknown reserves of literary talent.

"Do the police know who was publishing the paper?" asked Courfeyrac, once he had drawn breath.

"Not as far as I know. The atelier where I work is right next the print shop. There was some sort of scuffle when I was leaving to pick up lunch for everyone so I hung around until I say the gendarmes dragging Choderlos away. I sent Gavroche to annoy, that is, to interrogate the gendarmes boarding up the shop. The printer was arrested for slander against the king. Since it was slander and not libel, Enjolras guessed the printer had said something indiscreet. If he said something about us…." Feuilly trailed off.

"But Citoyen Choderlos is a good fellow, and a stalwart republican," protested Combeferre, after a moment. "Since he fancies himself a new Coleridge, the worst I can see happening is him taking more laudanum than is good for him and saying something seditious in a café while thinking himself in the company of friends. He would not betray us. Still, this will spook the other printers and our pamphlets and papers will be momentarily halted. This might be a good thing; indiscreet as we sometimes may be—" this with a somewhat reproachful look at Bossuet and Courfeyrac, though Bossuet could not remember what exactly he had done to earn Combeferre's scolding "—there are those with even less of a sense of caution. Revolution but civilization; we cannot tear down without building up something new, something better in its place."

Bossuet remembered heckling a couple of actors while seated with Courfeyrac in the Gods, at the Comédie Française, but he could not recall what he said, or if he had said anything along the lines of, "Down with the absolute monarchy" instead of "Your Tartuffe is an abomination and you are too fat for your costume". That had happened fairly recently. Was that it?

Courfeyrac thumped his fast against the table in a suitably dramatic fashion. "We must get word of this illegal arrest out to the people!"

Feuilly pulled a chair up to their table, Bossuet and Combeferre moving over to make room for him at once. "I met Bahorel on the way over. He said he would start in the Ile-de-la-Cité and move on from there. Joly is supposed to meet him for lunch somewhere around there, and Bahorel said he would send Joly back to the Latin Quarter to send word through the students. I haven't much time myself and Enjolras is really the one who knows all the leaders of the associations—"

"No, I mean the people," insisted Courfeyrac. "The wider public has to know about this. The Chamber of Deputies refused to pass the censorship bill Polignac tried to push through! The king has no right to do this, we have to tell—"

"How?" asked Feuilly. "They have arrested our printer and destroyed his press. Do you really think the _Constitutionel _would be willing to print a law student's defense of the free press when it is becoming very clear the king no longer needs the permission of the Chamber of Deputies to do what he wants to do? They have already arrested our printer and smashed his press; no working man is going to risk the same thing happening to him."

No one quite knew the answer to that. There was relative safety in publishing an anonymous newspaper; a policeman could always overhear someone whispering about revolution and drag him off to the prison, but it was harder to arrest someone who might, perhaps, have written something in a newspaper that bore no trace of his handwriting.

Courfeyrac had once been to prison because he had been extremely glum over living in an absolute monarchy and believed that the best thing to cheer himself up would be by getting himself a policeman's hat, even if the policeman was still inside it.

The policeman had not agreed.

Courfeyrac had not enjoyed his stay in prison, even though his ultraroyalist father had bribed Courfeyrac out of prison within days and obliviously warned Courfeyrac that, even if a group of older students told him he absolutely _had _to steal a policeman's hat to be part of the Freemasons, it was decidedly _not _part of the initiation rites to the Freemasons and, here take this handful of _louis d'or_, as he would be better off flirting with some grisette in a café or going to the Voltaire (it was still the Voltaire, was it not?) to play billiards. Courfeyrac's complaints had imbued the rest of the Amis with a lingering distaste for incarceration and the awareness that they did not have titled, ultraroyalist fathers to post bail.

At this point, Jehan came in and, looking at the glum faces around him, timidly asked what was the matter. Feuilly and Courfeyrac explained, until Combeferre looked up and said, "Perhaps…?"

"Yes?" said Bossuet.

"We could try and buy our own printing press," said Combeferre, slowly. "Enjolras still lives on the second floor in a respectable area near the Sorbonne and has a very Spartan approach to using his apartment. He wouldn't mind if we set up a press in what used to be my bedroom and is now his study. How we would raise the money, though…."

"Oh, I spent my allowance this quarter," said Jehan, deflating. "I wish I had known—I would never have bought that Ming vase, even though it sets off my violets very prettily."

Bossuet scratched his hairline, mentally noting that it was, alas, even higher than yesterday. "I doubt you alone could afford it, Jehan. Let me think… of all of us, the ones most likely to contribute would be... Enjolras, obviously, you, Combeferre, you, Courfeyrac, you, Jehan, me, Joly, Bahorel, and potentially you, Feuilly and perhaps Pontmercy, if you have managed to win him back over, Courfeyrac. You were a little harsh with him Combeferre. Now, of the eight of us, Enjolras, Jehan and Courfeyrac are actually wealthy, but—"

"Spent my allowance," Jehan sighed.

"Funny thing about betting on cards," said Courfeyrac. "It is much more difficult to win at them than popular novels would have you believe."

Combeferre polished his glasses in disapproval.

Bossuet decided to continue on. "Joly is well-off as opposed to wealthy, as in he has a two-bedroom apartment, albeit on the fifth floor, in a good part of the Latin Quarter, he can afford new clothes and his parents still pay his bills, but all his extra income is going to wooing what's-her-name, Musichetta. He would pull out for the good of the republic, but he is mad for the girl. _I _am growing mad just listening to him."

"So no on Joly," said Combeferre. "Bahorel…?"

"I never know if he's finished wasting his allowance for the quarter or not," said Bossuet. "I assume he has because he only came over to say hello to me and Joly yesterday _after _we'd opened out bottle of wine. Feuilly?"

"I make three francs a day," Feuilly said. "That's not going to help at all."

"No, not really. Combeferre, you are…?"

"In Joly's position, only a little diminished," replied Combeferre. "After rent, what money I get goes towards books and, if there is anything left over, I buy food and clothes."

"You would bring in Erasmus," said Feuilly. "But can you do anything?"

"No, unfortunately. I only have my food allowance until the end of the quarter."

"I know for a fact that Grantaire just poured the last of his allowance into a prodigal amount of hashish," said Bossuet. "I cannot understand why he likes the stuff. There are ways to doze among the stars without smelling like a Turkish harem. I fear he is in great danger of losing his title as the jolly prince of drinkers. Ah, Jolllly, the dear fellow, keeps a very bourgeois reserve of francs in his mattress, lest he ever fall ill enough to have a successful self-diagnosis. I have very little doubt that he would object to using it to doctor our ailing republic with actual news."

"Ah ha!" exclaimed Courfeyrac. "There's a good fellow for you, transforming his bourgeois practices into treatment for our nascent republic! He was made to be a doctor."

Combeferre began absently sketching a moth on the tabletop with a fingertip. "Still, Joly's reserve, plus whatever Enjolras has… Bossuet, you have gone back to living with Joly, so you—"

"Now know that betting anything against Grantaire is a stupid idea, even if Grantaire's math skills are abysmal."

"—and Marius, who was showing such progress before the unfortunate Corsica incident, has yet to be converted him from—" with a grimace of distaste "—Bonapartism."

"Even then the poor fellow is hard up," said Courfeyrac. "He has next to nothing and no idea how to live on that."

"I cannot see how we can afford it. The best we can do is provide our printer with legal counsel and hope to find another printer… though, blast, they will all be spooked by this and pull back. Bossuet, you work as a copyist sometimes…."

"I am _not _copying out fifty newspapers," Bossuet replied flatly. "Placards to post by the Hotel de Ville, yes, _newspapers_, no."

"We could have cut costs earlier on by giving our free copies only to the literate," pointed out Feuilly, with whom this was a particularly sore point. "I try to make my political cartoons as accessible as possible, but even they use words sometimes."

"Yeees, well," said Combeferre, clearing his throat. "Unless we make mistakes, how can we know how to proceed correctly? We managed to provide new soles for a number of shoes the first few editions and after that, we managed to find our _actual_ target audience."

"Or actually awaken the souls of our fellow Parisians?" quipped Courfeyrac. "Ah, Bossuet old fellow, luck seems to have tired of playing with you and has moved onto us."

"That or we see again the pitfalls of arbitrary monarchy," replied Combeferre, quite dryly.

"I could sell my long narrative poem on André Chenier," Jehan said doubtfully, having lost track of the conversation some time ago, "but the meter's off in the seventeenth stanza and I have no idea how to fix it."

"Well," said Bossuet. "This is not exactly a promising way to start the day. I lose another sixty francs skipping class without getting someone else to sign the attendance sheet for me, I receive word that my Aunt Agathe, who I strongly believe turns into a werewolf around the time of the full-moon, is coming to visit, and our printer gets arrested. All I need now is for Joly to give me his cold."

"Does he have one?" asked Jehan.

"He's gone to a lecture at the medical school," replied Bossuet. "He will come back with _something._"


	2. Chapter 2

Bossuet was glum as he attempted to translate an article for his publisher, but cheered up considerably when Joly burst in, announced that he did _not _have cholera and to celebrate, they ought to go to dinner and play a round of billiards. Bossuet dropped off the article, receiving a prompt and very welcome payment from his publisher, and walked off arm-in-arm with Joly.

To stroll was Parisian and therefore gave Bossuet pleasure, but to stroll with Joly and have Joly's idiosyncrasies and optimism to cheer him out of a bad temper was a treasure.

"If you do _not _have cholera, what ails you?" asked Bossuet. "You seemed off this morning."

"That is a somewhat involved story," replied Joly, twirling around his walking stick. "My anatomy professor always asks me how I am when I go into class. Leduc said it was to keep tabs on the other lectures, since I always come down with whatever we study, but that is more bad luck than hypochondria."

"Ha-h'm," said Bossuet.

"Anyway, my professor always sees me and says, 'Ah, Monsieur Joly, what are you dying of today?' and though I _meant _to say cholera, I ended up saying, 'love!' Sometimes the truth just slips out of me without my meaning to say it, which is why that ultraroyalist in Les Halles punched me in the spleen, do you remember?"

"Was that when you said that divine right monarchy was a lie born of the fetid couplings of church and state and those who believe it ought to be put into the care of doctors before they spread their disease to the rest of society?"

"Yes."

"I would blame the brandy rather than your inability to hide your thoughts, mon joli."

"I was _not _in my cups then," Joly protested indignantly. "If I was at all drunk, it was on liberty. I shall remind you, Bossuet, that Courfeyrac said worse things—"

"Do you want to use Courfeyrac as your example, mon joli?"

Joly wisely switched tactics as he steered them to the Café Voltaire. "Enjolras, then. Enjolras punched that ultra in the jaw for punching me and then Bahorel picked the ultra off the ground and threw him into another ultra and neither of them were drunk."

"Bahorel would do that while drunk or sober," replied Bossuet. "As it was, I thought it thoroughly decent of Enjolras to come down on that loyalist law student like the Archangel Michael on Lucifer."

"You then kicked the ultra in the kidneys," added on Joly, who had a good mind for details.

"Yes, because he punched you in the spleen. Where is the spleen?"

Joly brightened perceptively and poked Bossuet to the upper left of his stomach. "Here!"

"Someone is going to pass his anatomy final, eh, mon joli?"

Joly rubbed his nose with the gold knob of his walking stick. "I hope so. I am as in love with that class as I am with Musichetta, which, as I was telling you before I got distracted, is the reason why my humors are out of balance. It is no longer a _tendre, _Laigle my dear fellow, it is a grand passion! _That _is why I have been feeling a little like death, I have lost my heart and you know," said Joly, tapping Bossuet on the left pectoral, "the heart pumps blood to absolutely every part of the body. If it just disappears, you would be bound to feel some side effect."

Bossuet was not an unkind fellow, and liked most everyone, but he was beginning to resent Musichetta. He decided to change the subject. "And how did it go this afternoon? You saw Bahorel?"

"Yes. It took me most of the afternoon, but even Combeferre would be pleased with my caution. I wasn't the least indiscreet and pretended to be zooming around because I didn't have cholera." Joly rubbed his nose with the knob of his cane, looking quite pleased with himself. Courfeyrac often brought in Amis, but Joly could keep them, in the same manner that Enjolras drew in followers and Combeferre found places for them. There was more warmth, wine and wandering when Courfeyrac and Joly paired up than when Enjolras and Combeferre did, which was why Enjolras and Combeferre had politely asked Courfeyrac and Joly to leave Enjolras and Combeferre to cementing new Amis within their society once Courfeyrac and Joly had brought them in. Besides, it was growing gradually more difficult to separate Joly and Bossuet and a new recruit occasionally got skittish if three ardent young revolutionaries ordered him wine and asked if he had any political opinions.

It was all a difference in enthusiasm, Bossuet had often explained, when Grantaire had mocked their society's organizational structure. Joly was as enamored of learning as Combeferre, but could not conduct himself as calmly about it. If Joly liked something, he had to know it, in all its details, and could not stop himself from trying to bring everyone else into his new joy. Combeferre's enjoyment of learning was a quiet, almost solitary pleasure that developed into a wider, more practical one; though he was pleased to learn something because it interested him, he was even more pleased to learn something he could use to help people. Joly's unthinking fondness for and fascination with people was in Combeferre a deep and idealistic love of mankind. Joly's wild enthusiasm for new science was in Combeferre only a part of his consuming passion for the progress of civilization.

Courfeyrac had a true desire to serve and this manifested itself in how he knew himself and how he used it to set people at ease. Courfeyrac was supremely comfortable in his body and moved with the grace of a cat just coming out of kittenhood, all secretly fastidious elegance that came to the light at odd moments, and unexpected but charming moments of playfulness that made one relax. He wanted everyone to be as comfortable as he himself felt. Enjolras's desire to serve was more singular, more solitary; he did not wish to make people comfortable, he wanted to make them _free_. This desire to serve likewise manifested itself in an application of self-knowledge. Enjolras kept a careful watch over himself, and in that there was an entrancing, almost classical elegance. He moved carefully but confidently. When he did something, he knew exactly what he did, why he did it and what effect it would have on everyone else. Enjolras wanted everyone to see what he saw and to work towards the glorious future republic.

With Courfeyrac one was comfortable, because he was; with Enjolras one was inspired, because he was. Courfeyrac made friends, Enjolras made Amis.

"Joly and Courfeyrac have yet to overcome their humanity," Grantaire had replied, "which is why you like them better."

Bossuet had no answer for that, as it then occurred to him that if Joly was in the same place but a lower plane than Combeferre and Courfeyrac in the same situation with Enjolras, where exactly did he, Legles de Meaux, fit in? It was, admittedly, a question he could only have come up with after mixing absinthe with brandy and a good cigar, but it had still lingered with him. Now and then Bossuet found himself glancing at Joly and feeling afraid that Joly, bright, neurotic and generous Joly, the dearest friend he had had since coming to Paris, would pass out of his life like a sunbeam, leaving Bossuet stranded between the bright side of humanity and the oddly cold, introspective ideals the Amis all followed but only Enjolras and Combeferre seemed to embody, or, yet worse, stranded on the outside, a part of the vast, nebulous and _powerless _society the Amis were working to save. A further loss of personal agency was too hard to laugh off; Bossuet forced himself out of his reverie and said, "Joly dear fellow, you are a marvel. You have come a long way from that punch to the spleen."

Joly laughed, a bright, quick, merry sound like a harpsichord arpeggio with Baroque flourishes. Bossuet loved hearing Joly's laugh and often went out of his way to cause or prolong it. "I hope so! I hadn't even started classes then. Did Fate deal you a kind hand today?"

"No, a terrible one," replied Bossuet. "You see before you a convert to Catholicism and a member of the deserving poor."

Joly's laugh was startled this time. "Oh no, Bossuet. What happened while I was at the fac?"

Bossuet told Joly in great detail, to the point where he was finishing his story in the later stages of their dinner, and Bahorel and Jehan had arrived for the evening.

"—at which point, I was given an article in Polish to translate, as their usual Polish translator got hired in an official capacity by a rival. The world of publishing is an odd and dangerous business, with as much intellectual pilfering and in-house squabbling as academia, but with more actual influence over the lives of others."

"In your first moment of luck today, Combeferre isn't here to hear you slander the good name of academia," said Bahorel, dragging over a chair and helping himself to bread and brie. "He would start polishing his glasses and lecture you about chemistry and physics and their universal applications."

"Oh come now," said Joly, who, as the only other medical student of the Amis, had the most to gain from Combeferre's musings on the progress of science. "Jehan, put aside your timidity, you are among friends. Have some of this cheese. No? Some wine at least. What was—oh, Bahorel, you are too harsh. I love science as much as Combeferre, even if my interest in chemistry is currently focused in the process of fermentation and whether or not nitrous oxide is a good substitute for brandy. Combeferre is a stand-up fellow, a little serious, of course, but if I had an internship at Necker, I would forsake loafing for the lancet too."

"Has he found a new method of using magnets and thus won your heart?" teased Bahorel.

The subject of Joly's lost heart was irritating and somehow depressing, so Bossuet said, "Oh, Joly, you will be pleased to hear that magnetism may or may not have something to do with potato farming in Poland."

"Poland?" asked Joly, blowing his nose in polite disbelief.

"As I said, I did translate, or at least attempt to translate, an article in Polish," replied Bossuet, breaking off another portion of baguette. "I got there too late; the editor had already assigned all the articles in English and you happened to buy a Polish to French dictionary to better understand what the Polish thought of their latest partition. He offered, I accepted and was therefore asked to translate Polish. I have absolutely no understanding of the grammar or syntax and my only understanding of the words themselves come from your dictionary, but where my understanding fails, my imagination gives it wings."

"Spoken like a true Romantic," Courfeyrac exclaimed, throwing his arms around Bossuet. As far as Courfeyrac's greetings went, it was neither as sudden or as startling as some, but it still did made Bossuet spill his wine on the tablecloth. Courfeyrac sighed. "If I hadn't come to an abrupt end to my allowance, I would buy you a drink."

"Thank you, but my poetic additions to the potato harvest near what I hope was Gdansk can provide us with…." Bossuet scanned the menu scrawled on a blackboard by the bar. "… a half bottle of house red."

"I can help, I sold a poem today," Jehan announced, modesty warring with pride. "It was a pastoral."

Despite Bahorel's great personal affection for Byron, he did not like poetry in general. He had once explained to Bossuet that he, Bahorel, did not like poetry partly because he hated his peasant upbringing and long descriptions of the countryside reminded him not of arcadia, but manure, and partly because he saw any strict structure imposed on any form of writing by the Académie Française, brainchild of That Bastard Cardinal Richelieu, as an attempt to limit freedom of speech. Bossuet was personally convinced that Bahorel also did not have the attention span for two pages of alexandrines on pretty flowers, but kept that opinion to himself. Bahorel eyed Jehan suspiciously. "So, we drink thanks to the death of goatherds—"

"To symbolize the death of intellectual history," Jehan chirped, "at the hands of the hands of monarchal tyranny in the form of Zeus. I was very pleased with my last stanza foreshadowing the coming day of judgment for all monarchial oppressors. On that day, the trumpets will sound and their impure blood will spray out of their corrupted bodies into the furrows of the fields, their bodies hacked into pieces by the hoes of the farmers they so long oppressed, and their hands finally being put to some use as fertilizer for potatoes. On that day, we shall make it rain the blood of our enemies and no bourgeois umbrella shall stem the red fall of justice and keep them from being stained from the corrupt spill of arterial blood from the aristos they so adore."

Bossuet had forgotten that Jehan's poems tended to have an extremely high death rate, as apparently had the rest of the table. Courfeyrac and Joly were a little taken aback, and Bahorel had been surprised into approval. Bossuet scratched his hairline. "Ah. You have put some thought into this, Jehan."

"Yes, quite. Oh, and last week I sold one I wrote to Madeline before I realized she was illiterate. So I can contribute two bottles!"

"Half a bottle for everyone," Joly said, regaining his jollity, as Courfeyrac bounded off to flirt with the waitress and order the wine. "How _jah-_lee!"

"Your English is worse than mine, mon joli," Bossuet said, laughing. "I think it's _jolly._"

"You tried Jolllly," said Jehan.

"I did, I did, but English was my worst subject. I only ever learned it to keep up with Davy and Faraday and, unless you want a discourse on electromagnetism and the uses of nitrous oxide, I have no English at all. Oh, but any progress with Madeline, Jehan?" Joly took a keen interest in romance as, to the best of Bossuet's knowledge, Joly's life before Paris was entirely berift of it.

"Alas, no." Jehan sighed heavily, a hand to his forehead. "I always lose my nerve when I try to talk to her and start squeaking out, with no evidence of a poetic temperament, or absolutely _no _evidence of sanity, that I think her to be very pretty. I _thought _writing down the deepest stirrings of my heart would work, but as she is illiterate…." Jehan smiled ruefully. "Ours is a love crushed by the brutal realities of class distinctions."

"Poetry never helps," said Bahorel, pleased to be giving advice, "unless you recite it. Even then, you cannot just turn to her and say, 'She walks in beauty like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies,' as if you were talking about the weather that evening. Women have to be led into something—particularly grisettes! I do not know of a single grisette who will do anything she has not made up her mind to do already. Though, if your persistence and cleverness run head-first into a grisette's own willfulness, the only way to scale that wall is to put your arms around her waist and kiss her."

"What a lack of gallantry," said Courfeyrac, who had returned with the wine. "It requires no technique at all and deals the art of flirtation a heavy blow from which it may not recover."

"On the contrary, it requires a great deal of technique. If you are not careful, your soul-searing kiss will land on your beloved's nose. My advice, Jolllly, is to seize the grisette by the arms, growl out an 'I love you' and give her one of those punishing kisses so beloved of Gothic authors."

Joly burst out laughing, nearly spilling his glass of wine. "Oh, Bahorel, that's advice only you could follow! _I _could not do it."

"You lack the requisite boldness," replied Bahorel. "That is all."

"Not, entirely," said Courfeyrac. "You are a stout, dark-haired fellow, Bahorel, capable of demonstrating the force of your passion. Jolllly is pale, blond, and almost constantly on his death bed. Perhaps… ah. I have it. You ought to look languishing and offer your grisette wan smiles and heartfelt sighs—"

Bahorel added, "As should Jehan here, even though he is darker and therefore might be mistaken for a man."

"How kind of you to say so," murmured Jehan, either swirling his wine to test its quality or contemplating how much it looked like blood and thereafter devising elaborate metaphors on the subject.

Bahorel tipped his hat to Jehan at the quasi-compliment. "Besides which, Joly, you laugh and smile too much. If you find yourself incapable of sighing, a sudden kiss it shall have to be. Now, if you mean to just seize a grisette and kiss her, you ought to brood beforehand so that they know you have been struggling with yourself all night long because her charm and beauty have overwhelmed your reason or your sense of propriety. Brooding is the key."

"I would argue with your technique," said Courfeyrac, topping off Bahorel's now empty glass. "A bouquet and a smile does more to create the beginnings of a romance than even the best smoldering stares from a darkened corner. Besides, Joly is not made to sit in darkened corners struggling with his sense of propriety. Here, brood for us, Jolllly, let us show Bahorel that Byron's methods cannot work for us all."

"Me, brood?" asked Joly, with an incredulous laugh. "I can sulk and languish with the best of the Romantics, but I positively cannot _brood_. It goes against my nature."

"You are similarly incapable of sulking and languishing for more than two hours at a time," added Bossuet, realizing he had not spoken since the subject of how Joly ought to woo Musichetta had come up, and endeavoring to make up for this lack of wit and good spirits. "Alas for you, Jolllly, you cannot rid yourself of your joviality and are therefore doomed to become an old bachelor who leers at the maids before retiring to his study to test the magnetic qualities of alkali metals."

"Can you imagine me _leering_?" asked Joly, highly amused at this picture of himself. "I admire, but I hope I never _leer_."

"Even I don't leer," said Courfeyrac. "It seems terribly unrefined."

Bossuet shook his head. "No, I have never seen any of our circle here _leer_, per say, but it made for a clearer picture."

"Yes, it did," agreed Jehan, with a theatrical shudder. "It reminded me of my Uncle Jacques, only he leers at the footmen, too. It always makes family holidays at his estate awkward."

"Ugh, do not speak to me of uncles," Bossuet said theatrically. "They are too close to aunts."

Courfeyrac opened the other bottle and asked, somewhat absently, "Have you decided what you are going to do, vis-à-vis the aunt who feasts upon the blood of the innocents?"

"Write back," Bossuet said, deflating. "What else can I do? So far I have, 'My dear aunt, I was very surprised to get your letter.'"

The four others just looked at him, Courfeyrac with corkscrew upraised.

Bossuet, feeling that more was expected of him, added, "Sincerely, Legles."

Jehan set down his glass of wine. "Bossuet, your letter to your aunt is, 'My dear aunt, I was very surprised to get your letter, sincerely, Legles?"

"Yes."

"At… least you were honest?" said Joly, rubbing his nose with the knob of his cane, as he often did when thinking. "If she is such a Cromwellian Gorgon as you have made her out to be, it is a good idea to deal out irrefutable truths."

"The body of the letter needs some work," Jehan said diplomatically.

"I shall have to abandon truth if I expand the body of the letter," replied Bossuet. "If not, it would be, 'My dear aunt, I was very surprised to get your letter. I nearly died of terror. Please do not ever contact me again. Sincerely, Lesgle.'"

Courfeyrac resumed his wine pouring. "I think that might be more honest than is reasonable, Laigle. Try, I was very surprised to get your letter, but sat down at once to reply. I am…."

"Undeserving of your kind attentions?" suggested Jehan. "No, undeserving of such condescension." Jehan searched the contents of his waistcoat, though Bossuet thought he ought to call it more of a doublet than a waistcoat since it came up so high and was tailored so oddly. Jehan unearthed a charcoal pencil and a little notebook in which he liked to write down verses. He began to take down what they had so far of Bossuet's letter. "I was very surprised… sat down at once… undeserving… of such condescension. Should we outright lie and say, 'I would be glad to wait upon you at your earliest convenience?"

Courfeyrac shook his head. "No, with fire-breathing aunts one must always set one's own terms. Try…. 'I am undeserving of such kind condescension, but would be glad to wait upon you… today is Wednesday, perhaps Monday? Whatever date you pick, say 'after my morning lecture'. I hope you enjoy your stay in Paris, look forward to… would you mind an outright lie?"

"I was going to become a lawyer," Bossuet pointed out. "I do not mind in the slightest."

"Look forward to seeing how I may best serve you, as I have served Uncles Georges. Until then, please look upon me as your obedient servant, etc."

Jehan tore the page out and handed it to Bossuet. "You had best copy it out and get someone to hand-deliver it tonight. It is…."

"Ah!" exclaimed Joly, drawing out his pocket watch. "Eight-o-clock already? I have to go."

"Wh… oh, you had your anatomy class today, so you have your dissection tonight," said Bossuet. "I thought it started at midnight?"

"As fits my professor's schedule and the gruesome task of raiding graveyards beforehand," replied Joly, though he jammed on his hat and grabbed his walking stick. "There are never enough corpses to go around during regular hours and my professor insists that we have as much hands-on-knowledge as we possibly can. Ergo, graveyards and the Hotel-Dieu at midnight. Yes, you are perfectly right."

"Did you forget your Bichat, then? Four hours to fetch your textbook, however—"

"I did forget it, as well as my blue overcoat, my casebook and my dissection kit, but, no, I am off to treat my disease."

"Disease?" asked Jehan. "What are you dying of today, Jollly?"

"Of love!" Joly called as he dashed out the door.

Bahorel let out a rumbling laugh. "I never thought Joly would catch syphilis."

"That's not what he meant," said Bossuet, feeling a niggling sense of disappointment at Joly's absence. "He has conceived a grand passion for this Musichetta of his, who, as far as I can tell, has no idea of the effect she caused."

"Love is an odd force," mused Jehan. "No one can understand it, or fully chart its growth and decline, or define its grip upon us, our actions and our feelings. It is a force that creates and destroys almost capriciously. Why does it have such control over life? Can we ever conquer it or must we follow it? Ah, no wonder Eros was a child; who can follow the reasoning of a child once he has been educated against it, but who can resist it? There is no attempt at logic, there is no value placed upon it. Only in love can we be allowed to be irrational, only in love can we acknowledge and even celebrate the contradictions of the human character. It blinds us, it opens our eyes to feeling, oh what a force!" Then, sounding yet more pleased, "What glorious destruction it contains. Nothing is truly beautiful unless it has within it the ability to wipe out all that came before and to reveal the truth hidden by the edifices built over it by time and a corrupt society."

"Does anyone want to play a game of billiards?" asked Bossuet, glancing at the stairs and avoiding Courfeyrac's quizzical look. "One cannot be in the Voltaire and _not _play."

Courfeyrac agreed to a game, though Bahorel still had a few other clubs to visit. After Courfeyrac and Bahorel concluded their muttered discussion over their hats, Jehan, Bossuet and Courfeyrac made their way to the billiards room. Jehan came upstairs with Bossuet and Courfeyrac ostensibly to play with them, but, in reality, to take over an empty card table and begin composing a poem on the contradictions of love and its role in the coming day of judgment. It was still early; there were a group of medical students playing cards in the corner and complaining loudly about the smell of the dissection room, and two law students finishing up their game of billiards. Courfeyrac and Bossuet discussed the injustice of Blondeau with the law students, who then very kindly racked the balls for them and went off.

Bossuet kept the conversation light and meaningless, which was very easy to do with Courfeyrac, before Jehan looked up and said, "Oh, I forgot—I had it written down here so I _would not _forget, though I did. Enjolras seems annoyed with the two of you and said that you lacked seriousness of purpose."

"Ah and I had been so careful to steer the conversation away from politics this evening," Bossuet said, leaning on his cuestick and glancing at the medical students. Since they were now discussing the best methods to keep from fainting while watching a surgery in the amphitheatre and apparently bitterly divided between smelling salts, snuff and brandy, Bossuet dropped his voice. "Combeferre found us an irritant earlier as well. Will he tell us why, do you think, or will he merely gloss us over and turn our examples into pearls of wisdom for other people?"

Jehan did not answer, as he was counting syllables on his fingers.

Courfeyrac bent low over the table, trying to find the best angle of attack. "Do you remember that class on tort law we have together?"

"Barely. I never go to it."

"Do you remember when we had that debate about whether Martignac or Polignac was the worst president of the Council Richelieu and decided that the best way to decide it would be a Punch and Judy puppet show?"

"Yes. Punch and Judy are perhaps the only parts of English culture I like."

"Ah, proud as I am of our puppets, perhaps we ought not to have restaged it before our lecture. The professor is an ultra and, what is more, was not amused when I asked how one upholsters a _lit de justice._" Courfeyrac shot and accidentally sent the cue ball into the right pocket. He made a face. "Eh, I know it's when the king storms into the court and declares whatever the hell he wants and is thus not a _lit, _a bed, only a miscarriage of justice masquerading as a legitimate part of the legal process, but I love leaving the tort professor without a retort." He walked over to Bossuet, on the pretext of chalking his cuetip and murmured, "Combeferre was disappointed in me this afternoon because of it. Well, that and because you and I are now under suspicion as dangerous revolutionaries. Combeferre is convinced we will be followed."

"The two of us?" asked Bossuet, bending over to take his shot.

"Us and all those associated with us," replied Courfeyrac, quietly. "We probably should not have written down our best jokes and published them in a pamphlet."

Bossuet nearly dropped his cue. "Oh hell, is it our fault the printer got arrested?"

"No, he got into a bar brawl with a police informant after saying that Charles X was a fat pig. Are you going to take your shot?"

Bossuet made a terrible shot and just knocked the balls around the table. "But what can we do?"

"Take care," Courfeyrac replied, with a sigh. He moved around the table, attempting to find a good shot. "At least, that's what Combeferre advises. Our printer's been arrested and there was someone in a gray overcoat following me earlier. He left when Bahorel did and Bahorel plans to lead him to a boxing match."

"We lay low," Bossuet said grimly.

Courfeyrac bent over and began laying his cue stick at various angles against the table. "Correct. The timing is terrible, since this is the time for getting the word out and planning a protest if ever there was a time to do it, but unless we can get the superintendant of police to believe our puppet show was just a dramatic reenactment of a pamphlet we found and liked because of the scatological humor, we are in serious danger of getting arrested."

"Hello Guignon," Bossuet said wearily. "I suppose all I can do is write to my aunt and pretend to be a good Catholic ultra. I ought to have known by now that bad news always comes in fours."

"Threes," corrected Jehan, absently.

"Right." Bossuet deliberately did not think of Jolllly.


	3. Chapter 3

Joly was a bright and cheerful fellow who, convinced that he was going to die of some terribly painful wasting disease, had adopted Bossuet's method of laughing at misfortune and turning his problems into grand jokes to be shared with friends. The only times he was ever morose were when he had to dig up a body for dissection, when he had received bad marks, when he had failed to diagnose or treat someone correctly (he didn't count himself) and when his love life suddenly took such a turn for the worse one would have to dredge the Seine to find its mutilated remains.

That particular evening, Joly not only came back from a dissection shivering and smelling of death and formaldehyde, he also came back announcing that Russia was a cultural wasteland full of idiots who pretended to be French because they had no culture of their own, and those dastardly imitators ought to be flung back into the icy steppes from which they came before they could flirt with otherwise intelligent French grisettes.

"I see Feuilly's feelings on Poland have influenced you more than I had previously imagined," said Bossuet, who was lounging in a comfortable chair by the stove, more-or-less reading Goethe's _Faust_. "Still, I doubt that Russia took over Poland for want of culture."

Joly sniffed and, carefully hanging up his coat and hat, said, "You must admit that the first thing an occupying nation takes hostage is the occupied nation's cultural patrimony."

"And would the occupying nation here be a Russian aide-de-camp and the cultural patrimony be a gypsy-eyed grisette named Musichetta?"

"Humph," said Joly, rolling up his sleeves. "Have you seen my carbolic soap?"

Bossuet hadn't been so happy all day. Joly clearly wasn't telling him something, which was painful to think of, but there might be no more Musichetta in the future. "Yes, I slipped on it walking in and it is now somewhere by the bookcase."

"Poor little eagle. Do you need me to tend to your wounds?"

"No, not unless you can somehow heal the oncoming wounds that will be inflicted by my Aunt Agathe."

"You sent the letter?" asked Joly, lighting another candle and crouching down to look for the soap.

"Yes, and received her prompt reply." Bossuet flipped back to the part of _Faust _where Mephistopheles extended his offer of servitude and removed the letter. "She says that she is glad to be proven wrong (ha!) and wishes to observe me in my natural environment. My uncle was an amateur naturalist, as she takes care to remind me."

"I solemnly swear to be as apolitical as I possibly can be," said Joly, distracted from his search. "What will you do, though, just take her around to cafés?"

"I have no idea. Perhaps try and fob her off somewhere with the excuse that I have a class, though… there really isn't any way I can get out of taking her to a café and introducing her to at least one or two others of my friends besides you. I shall have to avoid Enjolras _and _Bahorel. Oh, and then there is this lovely line: 'Your late uncle Bertram was always one for quick judgments, but he was commonly held to be an idiot, not that I would ever say such a thing, and I will therefore base my decision in three ways: one, how you behave in your chosen company, two, how you behave in proper company, and three, how you behave in the company of God'. This translates too, 'I will ruin three days of your life'."

"Ouch, an entire weekend gone?"

"Friday in the Latin Quarter, Saturday evening at dinner with her friends, and Sunday morning in my church where she looks forward to hearing a report of my moral character from my confessor… oh, damn. This will be… harder than I thought."

"Jehan always goes to Notre Dame," said Joly, reaching an arm under the bookshelf. "But, then again, he has a taste for the Gothic and says he sees gypsies dancing on the steps. Or, euh, gypsies burning on pyres before the blank faces of unfeeling saints with hearts of stone hardened against human misery with the soot of the fires of the condemned innocent coating their faces with the layers of moral filth that so blacken their souls. It's hard to tell with Jehan sometimes. I know he told me he saw something to do with gypsies in the square in front of Notre Dame."

"Does he actually see gypsies?"

"Yes. _I _saw one steal his pocket wa-ah ha." Joly pulled out a somewhat grimy bar of red soap, put it in his basin and began looking around for his pitcher of water.

"By the stove," said Bossuet, who always brought out Joly's basin and water pitcher into the main room the night after an after-hours dissection. "I warmed up the water for you."

"How did I ever live without you?" asked Joly, with a quick, bright smile. "My poor little eagle. I wish there was some way I could help you. If only we managed to get up on Sunday mornings!"

"Ah, but that would entail staying in Saturday night."

Joly poured some of the water over the soap, releasing a scent that always reminded Bossuet of leather and, oddly, of Joly. "Alas, that is the price of morality, just like the price of a medical license is dissection. It is not agreeable, it puts one in a temper and it feels like the waste of an evening. Still, I like anatomy and I have begun to like… euh, not _like _exactly, since we are technically grave-robbing, but… tolerate dissection. It is _fascinating _to see how everything fits together, once you get over the smell and the moral ambiguity of it all." Joly tested the water with a fingertip and then, with a little pleased sound Bossuet found more endearing each time he heard it, began washing his hands and forearms. "I have to say, this is my favorite bit of dissection night. I have no idea what I would do if I had to come back to an empty apartment at two in the morning with graveyard dirt on my boots. The fact that I come back to _you _makes it even better."

Bossuet was oddly touched and flipped through his Goethe to hide it. "The price of free lodging…."

Joly chuckled. "Yes, I suppose, but I am a more lenient landlord than most. It is not an onerous rent to pay, is it?"

"No, to go to bed before three on a normal evening is a waste of the best part of the night." Bossuet pretended to look at his letter from his aunt, but was conscious of some odd and uncomfortable feeling of discord. Joly was such a bright, open fellow it was impossible to know him and not know of his latest illness, his latest love, his latest defeat and/or his latest triumph. "Mon joli, you are in good spirits?"

"Yes, though not pickled in them," he replied. "I did turn up to the graveyard fortified with a little liquid protection against the squalid task I had to perform, as is my wont, but it always wears off by the time we start dividing up the body parts to diagram."

"That was not entirely…." Bossuet floundered and was lost.

"There is some brandy in the cupboard."

"Jolllly," Bossuet began and then stopped, because, though he felt like he very much wished to say something, he had no idea what _to _say.

"Yes?" Joly looked up, head tilted to the side, almost bird-like.

"You…."

"Me?"

"Us," Bossuet said finally.

Joly did not quite know what to make of it. After a moment, he said, "Amis and amis."

"We are," said Bossuet.

"Yes," replied Joly. He poured water over his hands to wash off the suds and said, in a tone of very mild censure, "It is only Wednesday, Bossuet, and I have a midwifery lecture tomorrow morning. You could have waited two days before going off drinking with Courfeyrac and Grantaire without me."

"I am not in my cups," said Bossuet.

"No, you would be under the table if you were not in your chair," said Joly, setting down the pitcher on top of a pile of newspapers. "My dear fellow, I am always happy to see you enjoy yourself, but you might have waited for me too." He dried his hands, draped his blue dissection coat over the back of a chair and began putting away his books. "Byron recommends barley water and small beer."

"We tried that last week," Bossuet replied, "at Bahorel's insistence."

"I thought the barley water worked wonderfully," said Joly, skimming through his diagrams. "Ha, there's a way to get our printing press. Discover a hang-over remedy. We would be actually rich, instead of merely rich in friendship. Damn, I smudged my diagram of the lung. I shall have to recopy it." He put the book away and patted Bossuet's bald spot on the way into his bedroom. "It all seems a hopeless business, but if they press down too hard something's bound to spring up. Elementary physics and displacement of space and all. I either have to be less tired or less sober to speak adequately on the subject since, in its current form, it involves so much English. Goodnight, Legles! I will attempt not to make noise tomorrow morning." He closed the door behind him.

"… good night," Bossuet said and looked blankly around the main room of the apartment. There were only three rooms, Joly's room, his room and the parlor/dining room/study filled with their collection of books, a large, worn old table with two chairs and innumerable magnets, papers and metallic bits of whatever watch/gas lamp/battery/engine Joly was currently trying to assemble and which Combeferre would actually finish, a cupboard that always had wine, medication and various plates, cups and silverware, but never any bread, two armchairs, the fireplace, a small clock on the mantel, a writing desk with locks, their coats and hats, a couple of cheap prints of David's more republican paintings, bits of a skeleton, and the walking stick of which Joly was so proud. It was, by all accounts, a crowded apartment. Bossuet technically slept in Joly's storage room and was always banging his shins against the bathtub and crashing into the airing closet, causing all of Joly's bed linens to tumble down on his head.

It made no sense, then, to feel like he was far too alone in an apartment much too big for him. Bossuet had lived by himself in a garret in a very noisy, very dirty student hotel full of a hundred law students who preferred to do anything but practice law before Joly installed a bed in the storage room. Bossuet reminded himself that he had not liked the hotel. He then reminded himself that the building, being situated on the Rue Saint-Jacques, was full of medical students who were usually up late, either drinking (thought quietly) or trying to memorize the best method of extracting gallstones. Joly was in the next room, tinkering with his magnets before going to sleep, so Bossuet was not strictly _alone_. If he wanted to, he could knock on Joly's door and say… something.

Bossuet was rarely at a loss for words. He felt extremely out of sorts. He could just knock on Joly's door, stare like an idiot and say nothing?

"That was so clever Courfeyrac would bite his handkerchief in envy," Bossuet muttered to himself. "Joly is in the next room and you are too sober for your own good, Legles. Some brandy from the cupboard and then bed."

Even after his self-medication he went to bed feeling uncharacteristically morose.

The next morning he woke up feeling thoughtful, which Bossuet found even worse; he found it so distressing he went to class, so as to have the benefit of not thinking at all.

Bossuet and Courfeyrac had, by some miracle, attended the same lecture and decided they ought to celebrate this rare occurrence. Since it was nearing the end of the quarter, however, they decided not to go to a café afterwards, but to buy a baguette, a bottle of wine and some Camembert and head off to the Jardin de Luxembourg for an impromptu picnic. Once they had shaken off the man in the gray overcoat that still seemed to be following Courfeyrac by a mad dash through a flock of pigeons and tourists, they found a deserted stretch of lawn and comparative solitude.

"This is one of the many wonderful, wonderful benefits to being a Parisian," said Courfeyrac, flopping backwards, once they had reached the end of the wine and their appetites. "One can find the countryside in the middle of the city."

Bossuet, sitting next to Courfeyrac, began rolling the remaining bits of baguette into little pills and tossing them at a nearby flock of sparrows in the graveled avenue in front of them. It was still early afternoon, the sunlight pouring down on their bare heads, and, in the more populated areas of the Jardin de Luxembourg, the heads of tourists, Parisians and statues, all of whom were occasionally interchangeable with one another. Bossuet could not see any of them, however, only the carefully constructed avenues. It was possible, surrounded by the hedge-like tops of the trees, sitting on the verdant stretch of lawn, to forget that one was in one of the most populated cities in Europe. "The countryside is rarely this well regulated. We are sitting in the middle of an avenue of perfectly aligned trees with their branches cut into equally perfect cube hedges. Despite what Leibnitz says about natural geometry, this does not occur without the aid of a man-made straight-edge, nor do the flowers by Diana there—" he threw a bread pill to his right, in the direction of the statue, causing his flock of sparrows to suddenly migrate "—share the same bed without the proper introductions." He tossed a bread-pill at a sparrow that had ventured near him. Almost gamin-like, it cocked its head to the side, hopped forward and lept off with the bread as soon as another tried to challenge it. Bossuet began trying to lure the sparrows closer to him, until one eventually pecked at a spot of dust on his boot in the expectation that it was a bread crumb.

"We Romantics must reintroduce the wild and unexpected into this countryside, then," Courfeyrac replied lazily, closing his eyes. "Does one expect to see two law students a-ooowphphffff-the hell?"

A pigeon, attracted by Bossuet's generous alms-giving, had landed on Courfeyrac in its ill-calculated and ungainly descent. Courfeyrac batted the pigeon off his face and into a group of complaining sparrows.

"Ill-mannered glutton!" Courfeyrac said, shaking his fist at the pigeon.

"You must admit," replied Bossuet, laughing, "that was a perfectly timed note of Romantic chaos."

"But from a _pigeon_?" Courfeyrac demanded, outraged. "It stuck its wing in my mouth and its talons into my chin. I dare you to find a bird better suited to demonstrating the abuses of the aristocracy. It even has a sort of natural culottes."

"I do not have the pleasure of understanding you, or the wine to make such considerations irrelevant," replied Bossuet. He leaned back on his elbows, stretching his legs out in front of him.

Courfeyrac scowled at the pigeon, now bobbing its head excitedly into clumps of twittering sparrows. "Simple. Doves are the albino cousins of pigeons. It was, and is, the right of any seigneur to keep a dove cote and let his pet birds forage where they may, which always happens to be the recently plowed fields of said seigneur's tenants. They feed off of the pain of others and cause suffering where they go."

"Did you accidentally release all your father's doves once?"

Courfeyrac dropped backwards, imitating Bossuet's pose and leaning on his elbows. "How was I to know what was in the little house? It was pretty and vaguely child-sized. All traditional symbolism is inverted; doves are vicious flying air-rats and pigeons are exactly the same, only with the added benefit of mange."

Bossuet tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting the sunlight caress his face instead of his bald spot. It was so pleasant, here, so easy to forget the rest of the world. "The Luxembourg must remind you of home."

"It's odd how the idea of 'home' changes," said Courfeyrac. "It did when I first arrived in Paris. Now I consider myself Parisian and the Luxembourg just reminds me I _am _home."

"It is strange," agreed Bossuet, sliding down on the grass altogether and folding his arms under the back of his head. "Home was once the house my father earned and I lost in Meaux, but now it is Joly's apartment."

There was no reply for some time and Bossuet opened his eyes to see if Courfeyrac had fallen asleep. Instead, he found Courfeyrac looking down at him with uncharacteristic thoughtfulness.

"What?"

Courfeyrac shook his curls out of his eyes. "Nothing important, just… are things alright between you and Joly? Yesterday there were times when you seemed… almost sad in his company, even though you usually work off of each other to catapult us all into good spirits. I could be wrong, but I doubt it is merely the influence of your aunt."

"No." Bossuet closed his eyes. The mild buzz of the wine had worn off and he now felt oddly melancholy. "There is more to it than that, but I have trouble understanding it myself."

"Do you want to tell me?

Courfeyrac had such warmth it was easy to unthaw in his presence. He might be a negligent student, but he was never a negligent friend. He saw affection in the same way he saw money, as something to be given unstintingly whenever someone asked for it, or to be handed out unthinkingly to anyone who seemed like they had need of it. What came easily ought to be given easily, after all, and for Courfeyrac, nearly everything came easily. Since Courfeyrac kept confidences as thoroughly as he dispensed his friendship, Bossuet found himself slowly bestowing his half-formed fears to the other law student. Bossuet did not like speaking seriously about it, since it was painful to do so, but Joly was always going on about blood-letting being a painful necessity in the healing process, so Bossuet forced himself to be serious and to speak.

"I suppose it has to do with the concept of home. I dislike being homeless. An eagle must always have his nest after all. He can fly where he likes, but he must have somewhere he can return. I… how can I describe it? When I am with Joly, I have an odd feeling of safety, as if, when the world knocks me down again, I will not have to haul myself up and dust myself off on my own. There will be someone to offer me a hand up, fuss over my scrapes and tease me out of my misery. There will be someone who worries if I eat everyday and a place where I can… where it is easy to laugh off misfortune, where it feels natural to do it because, at the heart of everything, I am happy."

"Does it frighten you to feel like that?" asked Courfeyrac, after a minute.

"No," said Bossuet, slowly. He didn't want to go on, but he made himself do so anyways. "It frightens me to think that, with my luck, it could all vanish."

"Romantic friendships like yours and Joly's never do just vanish," said Courfeyrac. "My mother still has a romantic friendship from her schoolgirl days. She and her friend still write each other long, tender letters and fall weeping into each other's arms whenever they see one another."

"Joly and I have a romantic friendship?" demanded Bossuet, opening his eyes and turning to face Courfeyrac. The sunlight was oddly strong; everything seemed to be the wrong color, too vivid in some places, too pale in others, nothing like what Bossuet knew and to which he had grown accustomed.

"Yes. It is very English of you, but you do."

"English?"

Courfeyrac smiled and tilted his head back, his dark curls spilling back Romantically. Bossuet thought, rather pettishly, that Courfeyrac probably used a curling iron to achieve that effect or, if not, slept with curl papers, a la Byron.

"How is it English?"

"It may have begun with Rousseau, but all the English Romantics have them nowadays. Even their politicians did. What was Pitt without Wilberforce or Fox without Sheridan? What are Wordsworth without Coleridge and Byron without Shelley?"

"You have mixed up your parallel structure."

"I have just come out of a lecture. You cannot expect me to wake up so easily. Bossuet, my dear fellow, there is nothing _wrong _with a romantic friendship. Rousseau thought the world of them, and even Enjolras has his odd one with Combeferre. I suppose there is some appeal to having someone who understands you completely, to be the missing half of your… damn, where is Grantaire when you need him for a classical allusion? There was something in _The Symposium _about people just being one half of original big people balls with four arms and four legs and two heads. The gods got annoyed that their people merely sat around being happy and so split them in two. Everyone goes through the world looking for their other half."

"That seems like a limited view," said Bossuet. "There is more to life than that."

"Which is why you are friends with Enjolras as well as with me and Grantaire," said Courfeyrac, with a slightly crooked smile. "Personally, I think it simplistic to the level of parody, which was what it was intended to be. I think. All I took from _The Symposium _was that there was a thinly veiled suggestion of an orgy at the end. Still, to find someone who respects you and cares for you, _despite _the fact that they know you is… rare. I can see why someone would grow… possessive seems too strong, and attached too weak."

"At my worst I am possessive," Bossuet admitted, with the sudden determination to get it all out and therefore never have to speak of it again. "I call him _mon _joli. I resent Musichetta without ever having met her. I do not want to lose my home again." He felt oddly vulnerable saying it and so closed his eyes and tried to find some sort of joke to hide behind. "I was capable of happiness before Joly and shall be capable of happiness after him, but without him I cannot be _jolly._"

Courfeyrac laughed obligingly at the pun, weak though it was. "Ah, I should not have done that. Amis do not laugh at puns, as Combeferre would have it. Poor eagle, the gods throw lightning bolts at you and yet you smile. Are you so afraid that you will lose your lllls—" Courfeyrac pronounced 'lllls' as 'ailes', or 'wings' "—and tumble from the sky?"

"More terrified than I can say," replied Bossuet, reminding himself of his resolution. A quick cut, an outpouring of bad blood, a tourniquet of wit and then all would be healed. "For all our jokes, we are training ourselves for a dangerous business. I know if—_when,_" Bossuet corrected himself, "the barricades arise I will guard Joly and he will guard me, but if I should not hit the sharpshooter aiming at Jolllly's back… no." Bossuet flung an arm over his eyes. "_That_ does not bother me, odd as it may sound. One does not pledge one's life to the republic without at least suspecting that she will demand it be extinguished. If we were to succumb to the little horrors of daily life, if he grew tired of my misfortune or if I earned the ire of his mistress, if we leave too many things unsaid, or say too many things we neither of us mean to say… if we should be separated not by death, but by life, what then?"

"Legles, you have gotten yourself deeply entangled," said Courfeyrac. "I hadn't suspected this of you."

"I hadn't either," replied Bossuet. "My philosophy has always been to enjoy what I have without attaching myself to it so I do not repine its eventual loss. Here…." Bossuet sighed. "Perhaps it is simply because Joly's friendship is the first thing to have gone _right _for me in years."

"Shake free of the superstition that it will go wrong," advised Courfeyrac. "Our Jolllly is a product of the Enlightenment. He cannot be controlled by fate as easily as a classicist like Grantaire." Courfeyrac laughed suddenly. "It is odd; when I am with Grantaire, we always end up talking of Enjolras, with you, it is starting to be Joly. Man is shaped and formed by that which he loves, and his conversation even more so."

"Goethe?" said Bossuet.

"Of course! A bastardization of Goethe, but Goethe nonetheless."

"He has more humor than the other Romantics. I cannot take Wordsworth or Byron seriously and Shelley's cryptic musings I leave for Jehan to decipher. I almost mourn for the days of the empire; there were actual Romantics in France then, not the lackluster crop we have now. I cannot even name one good contemporary Romantic poet."

"What, Jehan's poetry displeases you and Gautier not to your taste? I know for a fact that you read de Nerval's translations of Goethe—"

Bossuet lifted his arm off his face to turn and glare at Courfeyrac.

"You must admit, you left yourself so open to attack even a man of sterner principles than I—"

"A hit, a palpable hit," Bossuet quoted. "Let us have done with the English."

Courfeyrac agreed, amiably enough, and even agreed to try and find a church for Bossuet, since he had a dinner at his Aunt Therese's that evening, and he was relatively sure she was always busy Sunday mornings and it was more than likely she was busy at church than somewhere else. "Tell Combeferre I will not return to the Musain this evening as I had promised which will either please him or make him polish his glasses. Poor man, I probably owe him a new set of lenses by this point."


	4. Chapter 4

There was still the rest of the afternoon to squander, so Courfeyrac and Bossuet made their way to the Corinthe after a game of billiards (Bossuet lost, as usual), where Monsieur Hucheloup boomed out that Joly and Bahorel were on the upper floor playing dominos before Joly's afternoon lecture. Courfeyrac and Bossuet went up the stairs and found the place deserted except for Joly and Bahorel by the window. The billiard table looked even more decrepit than usual, but Joly was sitting in a rare patch of sunlight and smiling, so Bossuet failed to notice anything else. Joly could never be an Enjolras, Bossuet thought, but there were times, particularly when Joly turned around to smile and the light behind him somehow got tangled in his hair before reaching any other spot in the room, when Joly was momentarily breath-taking.

Courfeyrac then ruined the effect by cheerfully draping himself over Joly and playing his next move at dominoes.

"Bad move," said Bahorel, setting down his own dominoes. "And there, I win."

Joly winced. "Now I owe him a bottle of wine, Courfeyrac."

"Bahorel will surely share," replied Courfeyrac, with his chin still resting on Joly's blond head and his arms loosely draped around Joly's shoulders. "Besides, you seem like a man who has been sober for far too long. Do you have any lectures tomorrow?"

"A practical anatomy lesson at twelve," said Joly. "But I have a lecture today at three."

"That is plenty of time to get tipsy," Courfeyrac declared. "I take it upon myself to order the wine if you will pay for it."

"I'd prefer brandy," Bahorel called at Courfeyrac's retreating back. "The Corinthe has abysmal wine and do not order absinthe unless you want Grantaire to come and serenade us about the ancients! There is a good fellow ruined by education. He goes to the Sorbonne and hears about long-dead tyrants who bullied poets into writing of their exploits and cannot forget them no matter how much he drinks."

"How does he even know where his classes are?" asked Joly, mildly puzzled. "A friend of mine started at the Sorbonne this year, mostly because he wanted a degree and not a profession, and he had no idea where his classes were, what was being offered and when he ought to attend them. I know the point of a classical education is to prove that one knows nothing, but they take it a little too far. I suppose one cannot blame Grantaire for always chasing after oblivion."

"Did you really give him nitrous oxide?" asked Bahorel, sweeping the dominoes into a box.

"No, though he's been after me to get some for him. I wish I know what makes him want to escape so constantly from reality." Joly rubbed his nose absent-mindedly. "Poor R, perhaps it is merely a failure of mathematics?"

"Are you really going to drag Leibnitz into the discussion while we are still sober?" asked Bahorel, fishing out breadcrumbs from the domino box.

"No, just… perhaps… I am sure I know as little about it as anyone else, but science has provided me with an answer whenever I search for one."

"Just science?" demanded Bahorel.

"I suppose you could drag Leibnitz and mathematics into it," said Joly, "but I was raised on Voltaire. Laugh at your enemies and say what you wish, though I must confess that my natural optimism is somewhat at odds with Voltaire's hatred of Leibnitz and his idea that this is the best of all possible worlds."

"I was raised on land," said Bahorel.

"As was I," replied Bossuet, "and I have lost it all."

"You have gained our friendship," replied Joly, with a quick, bright smile, "though that is probably not worth the exchange."

"Come now, an end to class issues," exclaimed Courfeyrac, bounding over to the table, Gibelotte dazedly following behind. "We are all equal before the shrine of Bacchus, for his power levels all. Ah, my dear… Combeferre?"

Combeferre, looking annoyed and slightly dangerous with his blue dissection overcoat draped over his arm and with a faint blood splatter on his cuff that he had not been able to wash out, said, "Courfeyrac." That one word contained an Absolute (in this case, disapproval) so well Bossuet instinctively looked for Enjolras. There was no one else behind Combeferre, who seemed to fill the doorway.

"Ah… I take it your dissection lab was today? Joly had one yesterday." Courfeyrac's smile was a little forced as he seized the brandy bottle from Gibelotte and began serving them all. "In fact, you ran out early on us, Joly."

"Oh, yes." Joly's expression darkened and he fussed with his brandy glass. Once Gibelotte had smiled vaguely at them and had drifted back downstairs, Joly said, "It was… well, dissection, you know. Combeferre you took the same class, you know how keen the professor is about practical experience outside of school hours—"

"I thought you ran out for an assignation with your mistress," said Bahorel.

Joly scowled. "With who?"

"You know, Musichetta, the one who holds you off with cruel persistence, is literary and has the eyes of a gypsy fortune teller."

"Oh, the one who got too distracted by Russian literature to send word that she even received _my _letter this morning?"

"Joly," said Combeferre, taking off his glasses and polishing them on a corner of his dissection coat. "I am sorry that your mistress has decided to throw you over for a Cossack, but I need to talk to Courfeyrac and, in particular about how he nearly led a _police informant to the backroom this morning._"

Courfeyrac froze. "Did… I?"

"_Yes you did. _Be glad I got word of it instead of Enjolras."

Courfeyrac was upset enough to run a hand through his curls and make them stick up. "I… oh good God, Combeferre, I had no idea. I just… he went off with Bahorel yesterday, so…."

Combeferre put his glasses back on, which served only to intensify his glare. "Yes, and then, upon, I assume, realizing that Bahorel was watching a boxing match and was therefore not one of your associates, returned to the Voltaire to follow you home and follow you around the next day."

"We shook him off in the park," said Bossuet.

Courfeyrac looked miserable. "But I… when I went to the Musain for breakfast, Louison came up before I sat down and said that you and Enjolras were in the back room so I went around and…."

"Louison told me she saw someone follow you out the café proper, so she went back into the kitchen. The man would have followed you up the back way had she not noticed and 'accidentally' dumped her dishwater on him from above."

"Brava Louison!" said Bahorel, grinning. "I shall have to leave her a hefty tip the next time my allowance comes in."

"Courfeyrac, what part of 'do not attract suspicion' was difficult to understand?" Combeferre demanded, making sure the door was locked. "The same man, by Bossuet's own admission, followed you in the Luxembourg. Furthermore, he followed you from the Luxembourg to the Voltaire. Jehan saw him. Jehan managed to distract the informant by nearly falling into an open sewer, so the informant didn't see you coming to the Corinthe."

"Is Jehan alright?" asked Joly.

This induced an almost unnoticeable softening in Combeferre's attitude. Combeferre was extremely fond of Jehan, in the way he had once been extremely fond of Joly. Combeferre had a tendency to make pets out of younger students and, though he was still fond of Joly and watched over him as he might an orphaned kitten just learning to be self-sufficient, Joly had gained both Bossuet and a measure of discretion and thus did not require Combeferre's tender care the way Jehan did. Bossuet often got the impression that Jehan would forget to eat (or at least forget to eat normal food and not, as he had once tried to convince Bossuet, Bahorel and Joly to do, eat brandied cream out of a skull) if Combeferre did not mildly remind him to do so. "Jehan's fine. He was a little shaken, but Grantaire saw he was upset and bought him a glass of absinthe and a plate of _carpes au gras._ They are downstairs now, discussing the punishments that ought to be meted out to police informants, according to Dante and other classical sources."

Bossuet wondered, a little vaguely, if Enjolras required the same solicitude. Was that a romantic friendship, the need to take care of and protect a dear friend? Bossuet could see Enjolras at work, switching between his textbooks and modern statistics and documents from the Year II, blind to everything but his mission, and Combeferre quietly putting a cup of coffee by his elbow. There, that was alright. There was nothing wrong with that, or with Combeferre gently pulling Enjolras off a table that wasn't structurally sound and guiding him to another one much more likely to bear his weight as he stood on it to proselytize. Though Bossuet did not like to fall into Joly's absent-minded tendency to think Combeferre Could Do No Wrong, Combeferre never did anything stupid either (saving the Let-Me-Experiment-With-Nitrous-Oxide-Without-Telling-Joly-Even-Though-He-Is-Obsessed-With-Fringe-Scientific-Movements-And-Would-Know-How-To-Administer-It-Appropriately incident, which everyone liked to forget had ever happened). Ergo, it was perfectly natural to want to keep a friend from potential harm.

Bossuet realized that Combeferre had been put out with him, Bossuet, when Joly had first introduced them. Joly had been naïve then, certain that his friends would be happy with whatever made him happy, and had not realized that Combeferre and Bossuet, though they both loved him, might not love each other. Combeferre liked the Joly that got excited to the point of obsession over electromagnetism and Bossuet liked the Joly who could drink a half-a-bottle of wine and still pick out the piano accompaniment to the lewdest songs circulating through the law school. Combeferre could talk for hours on the metric system because he could not stop himself when he loved something; Bossuet only quipped about the _Rights of Man and Citizen_, because he never liked to talk seriously about the things he loved most. If Enjolras had not risen from his quiet position in the corner and smiled at them both, in his odd, archangelic way, and said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it", Combeferre and Bossuet might have hated each other. Though they passive-aggressively scuffled over Joly from time to time, they were both Amis, and, at any rate, Jehan had joined, looking lost and timid, and Combeferre had someone else to protect and guide until he realized that Jehan really would be interested in watching the world burn to see what Romantic truths would then emerge.

Bossuet also realized he had not been paying attention to what was apparently one of Combeferre's greatest scolds, judging by Joly and Bahorel's looks of blank astonishment and the spreading brandy stain from where Courfeyrac had forgotten to stop pouring. Combeferre rarely scolded anyone outright since he could be devastating enough with a single sentence, and Bossuet was determined not to miss out on the flow of admonitory rhetoric.

"—utter thoughtlessness that threatens the ruin of all we have worked towards—"

"You sound like my Aunt Mathilde," Courfeyrac replied, in tones of greatest awe.

Joly hastily turned his sputter of laughter into a hacking cough.

Combeferre was stunned. He opened his mouth, closed it, took off his glasses, polished them and said, finally, "Courfeyrac, I think I will have to tell Enjolras."

"Oh God, will you?" asked Courfeyrac, honestly stricken. He put down the bottle of brandy and ran a hand through his hair, further deranging his curls. "I never meant—you know I have less control over what I say than Joly does when he gets angry. Honestly, Combeferre, I never meant—I simply wasn't thinking—"

"Yes and that's the problem," said Combeferre, angrily jabbing his glasses back on. "Do you realize what your carelessness could have cost us? If Jehan hadn't nearly fallen into an open sewer—"

"Did he catch cholera?" asked Bossuet, with the intent to make Joly laugh again.

"Be serious for once in your life, Legles," demanded Combeferre, because Joly kept fake-coughing. "For God's sake, we are in enough trouble as it is without you and Courfeyrac adding to it. It is not yet safe to rise up against the government."

"Combeferre, my dear fellow, I am fully alive to the gravity of the situation," said Bossuet, nettled. "It is never safe to rise up against the government. If I have to laugh off the noose before it chokes me—"

"If you had looked at the situation clear-eyed instead of through your usual fog of brandy…!" Combeferre cut himself off abruptly, took a breath and said, "Forgive me. I lost control of my temper."

"How is it that I have been trying to get you to do that for years and only succeed when I honestly had no intention of doing so?" demanded Courfeyrac, with a passing attempt at wit.

Combeferre massaged his forehead. "Courfeyrac, please. This is not the time."

"Look," said Bossuet, feeling awkward because it was Courfeyrac's unspoken duty to get everyone to get along and not his, "Combeferre, we will behave. We honestly thought we had shaken off our new friend this morning at the Luxembourg and we didn't…." Bossuet glanced at Courfeyrac, who, Combeferre's scold having sunken in, was becoming very obviously upset. "I think I mentioned _a _barricade in a murmur, but we acted stupid and said nothing that had any consequence to anyone but us. Honestly, Combeferre, we have some sense of discretion."

"If only you ever _used it_," Combeferre replied tartly.

"We did, I promise you," insisted Bossuet, as Courfeyrac appeared to be near tears and Joly was attempting to surreptitiously stuff one of his many handkerchiefs into Courfeyrac's hand. "We talked about pigeons."

"Pigeons?"

"Yes." Bossuet decided that Courfeyrac's quasi-republican sentiments about pigeons was honestly too stupid to be worth mentioning and decided not to elaborate on that particular subject. "Pigeons and Joly, really."

"I am deeply flattered, I assure you," said Joly, though he looked quizzically at Bossuet. "To be second in your conversation to pigeons fulfills a long-cherished dream."

Bossuet mimed 'I'll tell you later' at him. "Combeferre, we really didn't do anything today to draw the suspicion of any gendarme who decided to follow us. Besides, my aunt wishes to observe me in my natural habitat tomorrow and I will _have _to be on my best behavior. Courfeyrac promised me he would be as well."

"You are going to introduce your aunt to Courfeyrac?" asked Bahorel, apparently stunned.

"She rips rats to pieces with her teeth and Courfeyrac has an aunt like her. Several aunts, actually, though Aunt Mathilde was the only one who tried to forcibly convert us both from our lazy bohemian lifestyle by wreaking another aunt's punchbowl by jamming it onto our heads."

"I forgot that happened," said Bahorel.

"You weren't there," Bossuet pointed out. "You were with the other bousingots, parading naked in the streets. I remember that very clearly and, in fact, far more clearly than I would really care to remember. I had really been hoping I was concussed by the punchbowl and seeing things."

"I only vaguely remember that," said Bahorel.

"Lucky you," said Bossuet, with a theatrical shudder. Courfeyrac was staring at the table, looking absolutely crushed and absolutely ridiculous, since he had run his hands through his hair so many times his curls were standing on end. "Combeferre, honestly, we behaved ourselves today and will certainly behave ourselves until Monday."

Combeferre only polished his glasses.

Bossuet saw Bahorel looking pityingly at Courfeyrac. Bahorel turned to Combeferre after a moment and said, "I think it might be a good thing that Courfeyrac and Bossuet were idiots today."

Courfeyrac looked up at that. "Hunh?"

"I echo Courfeyrac's sentiments, however badly expressed. Bahorel, what are you talking about?"

"As hard as it is for you to believe, Combeferre, the Amis are one of the better organized student groups," Bahorel said. He was speaking with much more care than usual, pausing before the start of every sentence to plan out what he was going to say and how to say it, a bit like the pauses Bahorel took in the boxing ring, to plan out a quick set of attacks against an opponent. "Joly and I may play dominoes during some of Feuilly's Poland rants and Courfeyrac may have the decision making capabilities of a demented butterfly, but we actually do publish and go out into the slums. You and Joly have that clinic every Friday afternoon, Courfeyrac still passes on what he hears to his relatives and what he hears from his relatives to us, Feuilly tells us everything he sees around his workshop and inspires the workmen, Enjolras is always passing out legal advice and, when we can afford it, we pass out bread. We are careful about whom we bring in and, on every level of involvement, from you all the way out to Grantaire, Enjolras demands and we accept a life-and-death loyalty to our ideals."

"Is there something wrong with that?" asked Joly, a little lost.

"Yes," said Bahorel. "The other groups know we don't laugh at puns. I would bet you a franc the police will know that before the week is out unless—" he held up a finger "—unless we persuade the police that we are just as stupid as the others and we just like to shock the bourgeois for the hell of it—"

"—instead of genuine political protest?" asked Joly, rubbing his nose absent-mindedly. "I… suppose. I mean, it's not… we aren't bousingots, except for you and maybe Jehan—"

"Jehan is not a bousingot," Combeferre said firmly.

"Alright, just you, Bahorel. Aside from a couple of nights where Bacchus beat out Athena and Apollo, we really _don't _go out and… what was it that de Nerval did? Walk lobsters on leashes, I think. Or, you know, eat brandied cream out of skulls and pretend to cart around dead bodies. I like a laugh probably more than anyone, but I draw the line at eating out of skulls. The deadly miasmas clinging to a skull…." Joly shuddered dramatically.

"I'm not saying that you have to be a bousingot," said Bahorel. "You don't have the requisite irony, Jolllly, dear fellow. All I am saying is that you could learn a thing or two; if the bouzingos, who are a subset of artists and therefore have no interest in life and therefore none whatsoever in politics, can walk the streets with their lobsters just as freely as they please, why shouldn't we?"

"Are you suggesting we all start walking lobsters around the Luxembourg?" asked Combeferre.

"I just had a very odd mental picture of Enjolras walking a lobster around the fountain in the Luxembourg," said Joly.

"I did too," admitted Bossuet. "I think he is the only one of us who could actually do it with dignity."

"You are missing the point," said Bahorel. "If we act like idiots, the police will look askance at us but ultimately ignore us."

"Yees, but you forget that my aunt is observing me in my natural habitat tomorrow," Bossuet pointed out. "If we act like bousingots and hold nude literary salons, I get cut off without so much as a sou to pay towards the foundation of a republic and we lose any chance we might have had of getting a printing press."

"Is it a sure thing she will give you the money, Bossuet?" asked Joly. "I mean, if we pretend to be Catholic ultras, which I don't think will really fool the police."

"It… might," said Courfeyrac, albeit doubtfully. "If we act like idiots who will be good Catholic ultras as soon as money gets waved under our noses…."

Combeferre had regained control of his temper, as he had shoved his glasses back on his nose and put away his handkerchief and, said, quite mildly, "Our best plan is not to call any more attention to ourselves than we have already." He said this with enough finality to end the discussion and check Courfeyrac's mercurial emotional upswing, but not enough to keep Joly from coughing a mild protest.

"Your cough is not tubercular, if that is what is worrying you," said Combeferre, refolding his dissection coat and tugging his clothes into order.

"Are you sure?" asked Joly, distracted. "Because it… I, euh, that… back to the thing about the printing press—have you any idea how much they cost?"

"It depends," replied Combeferre. "I asked Feuilly to ask around. If we get an old wooden press, one hundred and sixty francs."

"That's more than I pay for my apartment all year!" Joly exclaimed.

"Yes, and that does not include ink, paper and all other appurtenances. It is also one hundred and sixty francs that we do not have. As I have said before, it is our best option, but it is not one we can realize any time in the near future."

"But it is our best option?" Joly insisted.

"Yes," said Combeferre, in a tone that meant that the matter was quite closed.

"Because," said Joly, with a truly Courfeyracian way of ignoring the finality in Combeferre's voice, "I know someone who would know if any smaller publishers are willing to sell. She could give me a list—"

"She?" asked Bahorel.

"Musichetta," explained Joly, a little pink with either pride or embarrassment. "She stitches books together when she isn't sewing petticoats or telling fortunes. And, anyways, I could provide a distraction for the police following us while you, Combeferre, and Enjolras or maybe not Enjolras since he can't help but draw attention to himself, but, if two of our number went off looking through the list while I provided the distraction—"

"Joly," Combeferre said, turning very slowly to look his fellow medical student in the eyes, "I may not have a novelist's understanding of the human character, but I believe I know you well enough to believe that you have done something extremely stupid."

Joly blew his nose. "Ah, perhaps. There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so."

"There is nothing… Joly, what did you do?"

Joly folded his handkerchief and put it away, so as to avoid looking Combeferre in the eyes. "Before my dissection last night I may have challenged a Russian hussar to a duel."

Combeferre glared at Bossuet, as if to say, 'This is all _your _doing; he would have been fussing with his magnets instead of challenging Russian hussars to duels without your influence', to which Bossuet replied with a glare of his own, as if to say, 'I'm not entirely thrilled by this either', and Bahorel ended the ocular conversation by bursting into loud and extremely inappropriate laughter. "You challenged a hussar to a duel? Oh my God, Jolllly!"

"You failed to mention this last night," said Bossuet, trying to keep his tone only mildly censorious.

"I was hoping I hadn't challenged a Russian hussar to a duel last night," replied Joly. "This morning, I received a very rambling letter demanding satisfaction next Monday at dawn, the place to be determined and may God have mercy on my regicidal soul, so I believe I did."

"I believe you did too," said Courfeyrac, torn between relief, repentance and amusement. "What happened?"

Joly squirmed in his seat, conscious of Combeferre's very disapproving glare. "I took Musichetta to the café; we were talking about Rousseau—"

"Rousseau?" asked Bahorel, seizing a glass of brandy. "When you said literary I had no idea you meant literate."

"Her father is a book-binder in Lyons," replied Joly. "She learned so that she wouldn't stitch the pages together in the wrong order."

"Your obsession with Faraday is getting out of hand," said Bossuet. "A literate daughter of a bookbinder who discusses philosophy—"

"She happens to find electromagnetism interesting and not worthy of mockery," Joly informed them all, as snootily as he could get, though that wasn't very snooty at all. "Well, once I explained it and showed her how it worked and all, but she honestly did seem interested. And, euh, she lives in a building with a bunch of other grisettes and this old reader who retired from service, and since the reader has a large sitting room, they all go there and chip in for candles and firewood and the reader, since the reader has no other profession, she reads aloud to them as they sew—"

"Joly," Combeferre said warningly.

Joly coughed. "Euh, right, the, ah, duel. We… had been discussing the separate spheres, and—" with a very obvious attempt to appease Combeferre "—I think you are entirely right. Combeferre, about how the separate spheres is faulty philosophy and just another societally-imposed structure to preserve the power of those that hold it. Surgery seems mostly cutting things up and sewing them back together, which Musichetta has been doing since she was four. As you pointed out the other day, our _tissu, _cloth, was, in English, tissue, which is flesh—"

"_Joly._"

"Euh, right. Well, we were discussing Rousseau and this Russian hussar with an odd accent leans over, smiles from behind his moustaches and asks if we have covered the noble savage.

"'Not yet,' I said, 'we have only gotten to the separate spheres.'

"'Because,' this lout went on, 'now looking at you, my pretty one, I believe in them.' Of course, he said _ma jolie, _which is what Bossuet calls me, or close enough to it, so I was naturally alarmed and asked him if he had had too much to drink or was feeling feverish because I was a medical student and could help. He _glared _at me then, and really, no one has glared at me in years, not since I accidentally magnetized all my tutor's fencing foils, _and _the Russian said, 'I was talking to the lady with the gypsy eyes.'"

Bossuet was trying not to laugh and managed to say, "Joly, my dear fellow, have I mentioned how much I adore your company? You manage to make me laugh when I do not even feel like smiling."

This earned a reluctant grin from Joly. "Go ahead and laugh, Legles des Maux, it is ridiculous. Musichetta was understandably displeased to be called a savage, and asked him what he meant by that, but the Russian lout only said that he was on leave from St. Petersburg and that even the white nights could not surpass her luminous and wild beauty. Naturally, I said that, though that was very true, the lady and I were in the middle of a private conversation on social philosophy, the hussar asked if Musichetta would rather have a real man instead of a scrawny student as her partner and to actually explore the glories of the untamed wilderness instead of merely talking about them. Musichetta said that she did not like the untamed wilderness because there were no cobbled roads, the hussar offered to build them for her, I told him there was no need to because Paris had cobbled roads in plenty, we ended up arguing over Moscow versus Paris, then enlightened despotism versus representative democracy, I called him a monarchist idiot incapable of rational, independent thought, he called me a mentally disturbed Jacobin who just wanted to watch the world burn, Musichetta started laughing, he grabbed Musichetta around the waist, and, euh… in brief, I slapped him across the cheek and challenged him to a duel."

Bahorel burst out laughing again. "Oh Jolllly, you did! I thought you were joking!"

"Musichetta said she wouldn't believe it if she hadn't been the cause of it," Joly said, blushing as Bahorel began pounding the table and Courfeyrac tried very hard to look as serious and disapproving as Combeferre.

"Joly, my excellent, excellent friend," said Bahorel, when he regained his breath. "You do realize that you have just challenged a _Russian hussar _to single combat. Swords or pistols?"

Joly's blush increased. "He said swords so, to be clever, I said, 'good, I shall take the pistols' at which point he lunged at me and we all got thrown out of the café. I assume its swords, but the last time I held anything pointy other than a lancet I was seventeen and my father was telling me that raising me in the _philosophe _tradition meant that I had to be as quick with a sword as with a word and _en guarde_!" He mimed an _en guarde _position with a surprisingly elegant hand flourish.

"That is not what raising someone in the _philosophe _tradition means," pointed out Bossuet.

Joly agreed to this, but added, "Yes, but my mother got to raise my other brothers, since, when _they _were children my father was always busy trying to adjust to whoever was in power. He fancies himself a Talleyrand, but really, he's just too indifferent to politics and too good at the bureaucratic side of things to be let go. I was always my father's plaything, so why not use my education as an excuse to do whatever he wished? I lost nothing from it."

"The phrase 'my father's plaything' when taking out of context—"

"Which we shall _not_, Bahorel, and no one will be telling my father that I challenged a Russian hussar to a duel over Rousseau. Though I am more-or-less certain he would approve, he would be very upset I did not use Voltaire as my example instead."

"We shall leave it at philosophical differences," said Bossuet, "or, if we were feeling more charitable, over the gypsy-eyed Musichetta. Your father would be delighted."

"Jolllly, do you need a second?" asked Bahorel, with sudden animation. "I haven't dueled anyone in over two months."

"I was going to ask Bossuet," Joly said dubiously.

"Ask Bahorel," said Bossuet, none-the-less delighted to have been asked. "If you asked me to bring the guns, I would lose them in transit. If you asked Bahorel to bring them, I have no doubt he would find you a working canon."

Combeferre had been staring at Joly in disbelief, no doubt shocked that anyone who had studied Condorcet and Rousseau under his benevolent tutelage could have misapplied them to the point where he challenged a Russian hussar to a duel while their underground revolutionary group was trying very hard _not _to draw attention to itself. He glared at Bahorel and Bossuet, thus absolving himself of any responsibility for Joly's sudden bout of stupidity and interrupted, "Joly, you cannot possibly go through with this."

"I don't see how it can be avoided," said Bahorel.

"Of course not, not with you as his second," said Courfeyrac.

"Joly," insisted Combeferre, with a particularly vehement glasses polish, "as a friend, I tell you that this is stupid and you are going to get yourself severely injured, get gangrene and die."

Joly paled. "Gangrene? Oh no, the body we dissected last night had gangrene. Is it an infectious disease—no, it's like breaking your leg, you cannot catch it. Oh God, but there _was _a chance of cholera again, since there's a chance of cholera everywhere—" Joly took his pulse. "Ah! An elevated heart rate! Oh God, what did I catch?" He began frantically searching for his hand mirror to better examine his tongue.

"Masterfully done," Bossuet said, shooting a dirty look at Combeferre.

Combeferre ignored him. "Joly—Joly, your tongue is normal and you do not have cholera, put the mirror down. Joly, listen. You will write him back and say that you are not going to meet him on Monday and you will resolve the matter through your second—"

"And loose any respect he's managed to gain from Musichetta?" demanded Bahorel.

"Waitwaitwait," said Courfeyrac, with the half-smile that meant they were all going to wake up somewhere on the outskirts of Paris with absolutely no idea how they got there or why they were only wearing their boots, "I think… you know, this might...."

"Whatever it is, _no_," said Combeferre.

"This might be a good thing," Courfeyrac said, with one of his I-am-the-most-brilliant-man-in-the-room smiles. "I know you thought my plan was idiotic, but this just proves that it was meant to be! We want to convince anyone watching us that we are a bunch of hot-headed idiots who like political agitation because there are pointy objects and obscenities and would drop them as soon as we realized that there might be consequences to our actions, right?"

"So," said Bossuet, catching on, "you want Joly to go ahead with his duel because it will prove to the authorities that we have the collective intelligence of a brick?"

"Sort of. Bahorel already lead the spy to a boxing match and Bossuet, you and I have played over six hours of billiards in the past two days."

"Right," said Bahorel, drinking his brandy with the air of a theatre patron quite enjoying the show.

"Right," said Bossuet.

"_So_," Courfeyrac continued on, more triumphantly than could be justified, "this is the perfect additional distraction. We are too blood-thirsty and stupid to be plotting open rebellion. We just like hitting other people and didn't play well with others as children."

Combeferre stared at him. "You… Courfeyrac, the point is _not to draw attention to ourselves. _Have you forgotten that in the five minutes that passed since I last reminded you of it? _No. _Joly, get yourself out of your duel. Bahorel, help him. Courfeyrac and Bossuet _don't do anything_."

"You're no fun," called Bahorel, as Combeferre slammed the door behind him.

"I still think it's a good plan," insisted Courfeyrac.

"It needs some work," said Bossuet. "I, for example, still need to act like a Catholic ultra to please my aunt. I cannot do that and be an idiotic law student who likes shouting insulting things at the Comédie Française."

"I will come up with something," Courfeyrac informed them all. "I feel terribly guilty over the police informant. I have to do something."

"That's what worries him," said Joly, glancing at the door. "I would go so far to say that that is what worries us all."

"You will see," said Courfeyrac. "I shall come up with a brilliant plan to get you, Joly, to win your duel, you, Bossuet, to win over your aunt and the rest of us to get out of police supervision and our newspaper up and running." Since they remained politely dubious, Courfeyrac huffed at them and, with an injured look, said that _Grantaire _would believe him at least.

Joly, in a passable imitation of Combeferre, pretended to polish a pair of spectacles and said, "He's the only one drunk enough to do so."


	5. Chapter 5

The back room of the Musain was enveloped in its usual state of scarcely controlled chaos, from which Combeferre insisted would spring the ideals of the new republic but instead gave birth to vaudeville pieces, one-act parodies of Racine, long narrative poems, short addresses to mistresses past, present and future, numerous caricatures of professors, several duels and, twice every month, an illegal newspaper. Since the press had been shut down, the members of the back room were left bereft of the towering monument of idealism that had lifted them from the thousands of other students deliberately not doing their homework, or, at least, so said Grantaire, very loudly. Bossuet, engaged in a lively debate over Volterian royalists and democratic Bonapartists, turned away from his table to Grantaire's.

"My dear fellow, you are being a little unreasonable, are you not?" Bossuet said, with a mildly censorious tone. "Just because Enjolras is out trying to file an appeal—"

"When you take away someone's voice," Grantaire began, without any clear way to end his threat.

"Yes, well, I am not trying to stifle yours; I am merely trying to quiet it a little so that others might be heard as well. Friche, you were saying?"

Friche was, like most of the Amis who passed out newspapers but were not Enjolras's chosen lieutenants, a law student with vague literary or theatrical ambitions and no real desire to practice law under a government that he did not consider to be legal. Unlike the rest of them, he was always intimidated by Grantaire's tendency to show off his classical education while drunk. Friche himself had not applied himself to his Greek as assiduously as he felt he ought, and, in fact, had forgotten almost all of the little he had struggled to learn, and lived in constant terror that someone would discover the deficiencies of his education and laugh him out of the Musain. "I was… er, yes, there is, I think, a very _French _fascination with a strong, centralized executive—"

"No it isn't," replied Grantaire. "Jove overthrew his father and set up his sisters and brothers to reign over various kingdoms in an astonishing display of nepotism surpassed in recent years only by Bonaparte. It's Roman, and, before that, it was Greek."

"One could argue that the Roman structure influenced the Roman Catholic Church and therefore all kingdoms under her domain," said Friche, with a valiant effort to ignore Greco-Roman mythology. The mere mention of Jove had made him profoundly uneasy and he jingled his pocketful of loose change to give him courage.

Unfortunately, the history student next to him, who was an absent-minded fellow who could read hieroglyphics but not the atmosphere of a room, added to Friche's distress by saying, "Besides, it's only after Caesar that the Greco-Roman model failed. Caesar Augustus did more harm to Roman culture and Roman literature than can ever be fixed."

"Oh spare us your endless whining about Virgil corrupting the heroic epic," said Friche, now desperate to the point of panic.

"The heroes of epics are all kings and princes anyhow," replied Grantaire. "Even Paris was a prince and not a simple goatherd."

"Ha, perhaps that is why we never can shake free of a strong central authority," replied Bossuet. "Paris may pretend to be agricultural, and slip its pastoral aphorisms into our language, but at heart it is a monarchist."

"Ha! When he chose Aphrodite? No, Paris is at heart a lover, though your Voltaires of the would try to convince us that Paris would chose Athena and leap towards progress. No, no, we follow our passions, though no object of adoration is as sure as wine!"

"You are lucky Enjolras is out and did not hear you speak of Paris as a mindless royalist masquerading as an agriculturalist," said Combeferre, wandering past their table. He adjusted his glasses, as he did when he was mildly concerned his own intellectual rambling would pass the limit of socially acceptable conversation. "Besides, you mistake mythology for history. I do not believe Napoleon; history is not a fiction, it is the triumph of gradual progress- ah, Jolllly, dear fellow, a word with you?" Combeferre made his way towards Joly, who had entered through the backdoor with several medical students gradually worsening each others' fears of either being arrested for illegal publication or catching cholera. Bossuet also waved; Joly rewarded him with a quick, cheerful smile before dropping his textbooks on a table and turning to Combeferre.

Grantaire drooped suddenly. "Enjolras hates me. I was here with Combeferre and Courfeyrac this morning and I was even drinking with Courfeyrac. He asked Courfeyrac to look over his brief and Combeferre to go with him. He said nothing to me."

"Were you drunk at the time?" asked Bossuet. "Bacchus needs his followers just as surely as Apollo, but one cannot follow both at the same time."

This inspired a six minute long rant about Apollo, Hyperion and satyrs which amused the history student and Bossuet but sent Friche, who did not understand a word of it, into hysterics. At the end of it, Friche announced, "No wonder Enjolras refuses to speak with you! You have nothing worthwhile to say and turn everything into nonsense. You cannot believe in ideals, you must tear them down and in their place set idols of caprice and cruelty! To distract us from what is _really _important to celebrate debauchery with the—the—"

"The enthusiasm of a bacchante?" asked Bossuet.

Friche let out something half-way between a curse and a scream and stalked out of the Café Musain.

"I had not intended that debate to end the way it did," said Bossuet, never-the-less shifting in his chair to face Grantaire. "That was…."

"Truthful?" prompted the history student.

"I _was _going to say harsh," said Bossuet.

"Oh, that too," said the history student, "but I must admit, Grantaire, you are the first person I would invite to a drinking party, but the last I would invite to a political salon."

Grantaire was now draped over his chair in despair, his chin resting on the top of the back and his arms limp at his sides. "Do you really… my dear eagle of words, fly the straight and narrow. I am a drunken lout good for nothing but leading the way to vinous oblivion?"

"You do it very poetically," said Bossuet. "Besides, you helped Jehan study for his classics final the other day, though why he chose to take a useless degree in letters I shall never know. Perhaps he can just afford to study what he likes and—"

The diversionary tactic had not worked. Grantaire stared hopelessly at the floor and said in a low, sad voice, "And I suppose Enjolras thinks that too."

"Enjolras may think that," hedged Bossuet, searching for some sort of loophole, "but we do not all share that opinion."

"Just most of us," said the history student. "I personally think you are the best fellow on earth to have around when the debate gets too heated over how Robespierre treated Desmoulins's views on the Terror, but you must admit, grand R, that at the start of those debates, you have nothing to contribute. Your understanding of history is good, but limited to Greece and Rome. In fact, Enjolras once said that you knew nothing but your absinthe bottle and the fairies that floated around your head because of it."

Bossuet glared at the history student. "Martin, a little tact."

"Eh? Did I say something…?"

Grantaire looked close to tears. "Absinthe does not make me hallucinate."

"You must be very lonely without the fairies, then," said the history student.

"Martin!"

"What?"

Bossuet put a comforting arm around Grantaire's slumped shoulders. "Grantaire, not everyone can have the same seriousness of purpose as Combeferre and Enjolras. It stands to reason that they, having crafted themselves so as to fulfill their ideals as best they can, cannot now understand the allure of say, eating and drinking like normal people."

"Maybe if you were sober and didn't speak like a classics professor gone mad, they might see fit to lower themselves to your level," Martin suggested helpfully.

"Martin, do you come up with these things on the spot, or are they result of previous study?"

"Previous study," replied Martin. "I model my rhetoric somewhat on Enjolras's, only I think he tends to be much more metaphoric than is strictly necessary."

"I fear for the psyches of your future students. Jolllly!" Bossuet waved at his roommate. "I found another aspect of British culture I like, punch! Join us, will you?"

Joly did, quite happily, until Martin had left and Combeferre pointed out that Joly had never answered his question.

"Euh, I didn't?" said Joly, a bit vaguely. Bossuet had not quite remembered how to mix punch and ended up putting as much alcohol as could possibly fit into the punch bowl. Joly, being rather scrawny, was feeling the effects much more than the rest of them. "I do… oh, euh… I think… what was the question?"

Combeferre took away Joly's glass. "Are you going through with the—"

"I have a fencing lesson at the Rue de Cotte," Joly said, glancing at his pocket watch. "I almost forgot. Do you have a message you'd like me to take?"

"Put the tips on the swords," said Combeferre, though he polished his glasses at Joly. "I suppose that partially answers my question, though I thought you had enough sense to keep from dueling the Russian hussar."

"Bahorel's gone to talk to the hussar's second, but Bahorel caught his mistress with a law student, and is now in a foul temper. I doubt he would have minded if it hadn't been a law student, but, as it is, he's in a foul temper. You know what that does to his debating skills. If he starts losing, he'll puch the Russian second in the face and there will be no chance of getting out of the duel. It is best to be prepared. As to the rest… honestly, Combeferre, the last time I went along with one of Courfeyrac's plans, I woke up with a cold, a handful of feathers in my pocket and absolutely no memory of why I was only wearing one boot and had lost the back section of my waistcoat. _I_ have given up the attempt, at least."

Combeferre switched tactics. "Are you sober enough to be holding a sword?"

Joly stood and attempted to walk in a straight line. He mostly succeeded. "Euh, enough to put the rubber tips on the swords. Really, I didn't have brandy on the brain before, I just forgot the question. Anything else?"

"No, I'm still waiting for Enjolras." Combeferre sighed and shoved his glasses into place. "He's the one with contacts in the Association libre pour l'Education du Peuple and with actual knowledge of the censorship cases going to trial and, more importantly, the ones that are not. Until I know the particulars of the printing situation, how and if they might trace our newspapers and pamphlets back to us, I have no desire to blunder on and endanger not only our lives, but the lives of those only tangentially associated with us. I think the best thing, in future, would be to buy a printing press ourselves and thus eliminate the risk of the persecution of the innocent, but when we are already under suspicion…."

"I shan't ask Musichetta for the list then, if she ever writes back to me, and shall only ask her to think fondly of me when my anemic blood has been spilt over the cobblestones of Paris," said Joly, tipping his hat, gathering up his books and marching determinedly out the back door.

"_I _know," said Grantaire, quite suddenly. "We do not have to involve Enjolras at all. We can show him that I-that _we _can take care of the practical particulars while he chases after his ideals. We can buy a printing press."

"Grantaire, don't you think it might look suspicious if we bought a printing press just now?" asked Combeferre. "It is the best course of action, but is one that must be delayed for the moment." He paused. "You haven't been talking to Courfeyrac, have you? His plan is… not a good one."

Grantaire waved this off as unimportant. "Bossuet, my dear fellow, you have a rich aunt coming to stay, do you not?"

"I do, but she is hardly likely to buy me a printing press, unless it is to print off a great list of things she did not say about me, my father, my mother or any other of my friends and relations."

"No, no," said Grantaire impatiently. "You were telling me earlier that she wishes to observe you in your natural habitat. Well, why not? We play up our eccentricities a la Courfeyrac and then we charm her into helping you by allowing her to reform all of us, including you, of our wastrel bohemian lifestyles. She would give you enough money to live _and _to buy a printing press."

"If combined with Joly's reserve, Jehan's poem on Chenier and Enjolras's allowance… depending on how generous she is, that might make one hundred and sixty five francs." Bossuet trailed off thoughtfully. He was not really an optimist; he was certain anything he had would break, get stolen or disappear just when he needed it and acted accordingly. However, 'acting accordingly' tended to mitigate any disaster and… well, who knew what would happen? It wasn't a bad plan and Joly's optimism was rubbing off on him. It could work. Bossuet could almost see Joly rubbing his nose with the knob of his cane and chirping, "One never knows the results of an experiment until after the trials, my dear fellow!"

Combeferre began polishing his glasses. "Grantaire, I respect your humanity and intelligence and therefore mean to cast no aspersions on you personally when I say that you have said many stupid things in this backroom, but none of them have reached this astonishing level of imbecility."

"No, no, let him finish," said Bossuet. "You never know when stupidity can cross the line into genius."

"Ah, here is a true eagle, spotting, with his keen eye, the work of a stratagem so brilliant Napoleon would stomp on his hat in envy!" exclaimed Grantaire, grinning. "Now, _I _know how we charm the old lady into letting our eagle have a nest feathered in francs. We set Courfeyrac on her."

"Even Courfeyrac has standards," Combeferre pointed out.

"Are you sure?" asked Grantaire.

Combeferre polished his glasses again.

"Right, we set Courfeyrac on her… but only after Bossuet… ah ha, I have it, only after Bossuet pretends that he acts like a bohemian because he is trying to convert us all from our sinful ways. At heart, he is a Catholic ultra so devoted to the well-being of his fellows that he has been covertly trying to cure us of that most dangerous of diseases, political radicalism. The aunt will get to lecture, as will surely please her, and we will pretend to be so stunned by the force of her rhetoric and smitten by the strength of her character we become sober members of the bourgeoisie who carry umbrellas and complain that governmental censorship has not gone far enough."

"I see only a descent into greater stupidity," Combeferre said, displeased. "What, and then have Feuilly ask to paint her likeness and Jehan ask if he can dedicate his next poem on Chenier in her honor?"

"Ah, you see how one good idea can spawn another? You can ask to name a moth after her, or… no, better idea. Joly will host a dinner for Bossuet's aunt in gratitude for her setting him on a magnetically aligned path to righteousness. Joly's a good, kind fellow, he will do it. He will invite you, because nothing is quite so impressive to a bourgeoisie as a former student of a Grande Ecole except a former student of a Grand Ecole that they have corrected, and Jehan because one could mistake his obsession for Chenier as a condemnation of republicanism and Courfeyrac because his father is a member of the nobility and can beat his peasants when he feels so inclined. Talk about Goethe—"

"Kant would be better," said Bossuet. "Or St. Augustine, actually…."

"But none of us really like St. Augustine," protested Combeferre, "and… why am I dignifying this with the compliment of a rational response? Grantaire, _no_, I will have no part in this. I am not about to seduce an old royalist into financing Bossuet's transformation from bohemian to bourgeois so that we can buy a printing press we will not know how to operate for an illegal republican newspaper that will not be able to distribute."

"When you put it like that," said Grantaire, "it sounds stupid."

"Because it is," Combeferre said firmly.

Grantaire scowled and raised his glass before apparently thinking better of it and putting it down again. "Do you have any other ideas? Jehan could sell his Chinese vase, but just look at him! Anyone with half-a-brain could cheat him while he was thinking up for a rhyme to 'apocalypse'."

"Grantaire," Combeferre said, taking off his glasses and polishing them, to show he was serious in his disapproval, "you are, in fact, suggesting that we prostitute ourselves for the republic."

"No, if I was, we would hire ourselves out to widows with weaknesses for handsome, idealistic young students, or go to one of the society ladies of Courfeyrac's father's circle and propose, for a small fee, to be the, ah… dance partners to any lady without someone to… show her the steps, so to speak."

"No, we shall _not _say that," replied Combeferre. "Nor shall we put advertisements in the government papers saying that we are a group of handsome, idealistic young students willing to hire themselves out as companions, like impoverished spinsters, because you and I _both _know that some old molly will ask Jehan to come out to Champagne or somewhere to see his _art collection _and Jehan will believe the all allusions to David and Jonathan and Orestes and Pylades are merely standards of Romantic friendship and classical allusions as opposed to investigations into the degree of Jehan's liberalism."

"I know a number of women who would gladly pay for Enjolras's company," said Bossuet.

"To… you are _not _suggesting—"

"No, no," Bossuet interrupted hastily, as he received glares from both Combeferre and Grantaire. "Perhaps if we were to host a ball, charge an admission fee and just let it be known that Enjolras will be there…."

"What, and have him glare all our customers into hysterics?" asked Bahorel, coming in and wandering over, drawn as much by the remaining punch as by the argument. "Of all of us, only Enjolras, Jehan and Courfeyrac have first-hand knowledge of how their mothers planned balls and none of them would have paid the slightest bit of attention, and good for them! We have no need of acting like some sort of harem for the fantasies of bored girls with too much time on their hands."

"Can you think of anything better?" demanded Grantaire.

"No," said Bahorel, "but it has always been my habit to destroy rather than to create. It is a great deal more fun."

"May you live in interesting times," said Combeferre, who had recently taken to studying Chinese culture, just out of general curiosity. "The answer to our financial difficulties will not, and I have no idea why I have to repeat this, _will_ _not involve prostitution._"

"How about moral ambiguity?" asked Grantaire.

"Would _you _like to tell Enjolras that our newspaper to send forth the truth into a sea of journalistic non-integrity was funded by moral ambiguity?"

"Euh… no, not really. Looks like it is all up to you Bossuet, you and your aunt."

"What did I say about prostitution?" demanded Combeferre.

Grantaire drummed his fingers on the back of his chair. "Does it still count if it's Courfeyrac?"

"Does it—_yes it does still count if it's Courfeyrac._"

"What if…" Bossuet began, feeling hopeful, "we tried to convert her to our cause?"

"A monarchist who remained unmoved by the American republic? I cannot see how that would possibly work."

"Why, with a good deal of charm—"

"Why do I have to keep reminding you that _there is no need to resort to prostitution_?"

"No, no," said Bossuet, flashing a smile at Combeferre. "Not seduction, just clear, rational argument, unlocking the shackles and leading her to truth, like a prisoner from a cave."

"Plato," added Grantaire, with what he clearly thought was a winning smile.

Combeferre stared at him. "I get the feeling that you would never have come up with these ideas if Enjolras was here. If Courfeyrac was, yes, but no, let Combeferre be in charge and then everyone has prove the existence of the inalienable right of free speech in a republic, even if it it's a republic between four walls with a locked door, by abusing it. No, no, no, this is not a good idea, your aunt will not enter into the situation, Bossuet, and I will not have to tell Enjolras that we caused more social ills than we attempted to solve in printing our newspaper."

However, another hour of increasingly bad plans by Grantaire (which included opening and staring in a cabaret, starting an art gallery in Courfeyrac's apartment, writing a pornographic pamphlet with Feuilly using the Amis as nude models, opening a fish shop ("because fish has to be wrapped in newspaper, Combeferre, just like Homerian hero has be wrapped in extended metaphor!") and opening a casino in the back room of the Café Musain), Combeferre gave in and admitted that perhaps convincing Bossuet's aunt that she had converted all the Amis to conservative Catholicism was not the worst plan in the world. That he reserved for Grantaire's plan to turn the backroom into a 'living statuary', or, as Bahorel intrepreted it, a themed brothel, where everyone played the part of an Olympic god (Grantaire had even assigned a few parts before Combeferre actually cracked, such as Apollo for Enjolras, who would look good in a toga, Dionysus for Grantaire, who would very much enjoy the part, and Athena for Combeferre, because cross-dressing was a staple of any good, classically inspired drama).

"I cannot get out of entertaining my aunt," said Bossuet, when Combeferre had polished his glasses so hard he popped out one of the lenses. "Any good friend could come to my aid in my hour of need, but only a dedicated revolutionary and an unorthodox genius would take a look at my problem and see in it an opportunity to help out an even greater friend, the republic."

"If it will keep a roulette wheel out of the backroom and me out of a dress, fine," said Combeferre, now wearied to the point of tears. "Why is it, Grantaire, that I have to keep stressing _no prostitution _with you? Oh God of the innocent and the good, why have you so abandoned your children?"

"You went to the Polytechnique, before deciding you didn't like your military obligation and switching to medicine," Grantaire said kindly. "You could not have expected to get out of there sane. My father certainly did not."

"I hope Satan, encased in ice, will take his time off from masticating Brutus to gnaw on your head for betraying the moral progress of the republic," said Combeferre, though he was unused to insults and delivered it badly.

"You ought to have written that one down and slid it over to me to recite," said Bahorel. "That was worse than when Estelle, a very pretty young thing, asked Enjolras what he did for fun and, upon the response of, 'liberate the enslaved masses from the tyranny of absolute monarchy', said, 'your eyebrows are too blond'."

"They are not," Grantaire said, indignant on Enjolras's behalf. "Flaws like too-blond eyebrows are for lesser mortals than Enjolras. He may have no feelings, but he has no flaws either."

"He certainly does have feelings," said Combeferre, "and every one of them will revolt against this plot."

"Then wash your hands of us like Pontius Pilate and let us be the true messiahs of the second French republic!" exclaimed Grantaire. "This will be a brilliant plan. If I had sold my soul to Mephistopheles, it would not have been a better one!"

"If you had sold your soul to Mephistopheles," said Combeferre, "you could have just demanded he get you a printing press and we would not have to pretend to be converted to the very system of thought we have resolved to eradicate. The good must be innocent—"

"So let us dirty our hands and scrape in the mud to build the foundation for your barricade," snapped Grantaire. "As Danton said, _l'audace, toujours l'audace._"

"As Danton also said, 'Virtue is what I do every night with my wife.' _You _tell Enjolras that and see what happens." Combeferre tried to shove his glasses back on his nose, realized that he was missing a lens and let out a 'tch' of frustration. "Are you seriously going to go through with this Bossuet?"

Bossuet shrugged. "I have to impress my aunt somehow. If I enlist my Amis to impress her to the point where she gives me enough money to live, then I will, in turn, have enough money to give them a voice. Courfeyrac is already finding a church for me, and it was obvious my aunt would ask around to try and determine how and with whom I pass my day. If you are willing to enter into the fiction…?"

"Of course!" exclaimed Bahorel. "Most of us are law students. Why would we mind inventing a case?"

"Are you still even registered at the law school anymore?" demanded Combeferre.

"Eh, probably. I go to one class a semester, though I take every precaution before sitting in it."

Combeferre looked around at each of them and said, very slowly, "There is nothing I can do to convince you that this is a stupid plan doomed to failure, no pithy word to say or catchy song to convince you to stop…?"

"First of all," said Bahorel, shaking a finger at Combeferre, "none of us are Pontmercy, as in, willfully blinded by an odd mix of ignorance, innocence and idolatry. We are rational—"

"Rational?" demanded Combeferre.

"…alright, _thinking _adults who function along thought-patterns closer to logic. _Second _of all, we are not praising Bonaparte, we are engaging in practical politics to secure freedom of speech. Small steps Combeferre, small steps. Look, you ought to be glad I am even trying to build something here without completely destroying the old order before hand. I am working within the system, as shaky and collapsible as it is."

"Though I am pleased you have learned to compromise," said Combeferre, "I would have been happier to see it applied to other circumstances. Legles, are you really…?"

"Determined? Indeed I am." He was. Bossuet was absolutely confident that he would succeed. "If we are using the money Enjolras's father sends him to theoretically spend on wine, women and song, then we should have no compunction about using the money my aunt would give me to make me bourgeois. We take the raw materials given to us to transform our lives and use them to transform ourselves in ways our kindly relatives would never have imagined."

Combeferre, in some desperation, turned to a suspiciously smiling Grantaire.

"There, I have helped build your republic," said Grantaire.

"Or its tomb," said Combeferre.

"I thought you said no pithy one-liners," objected Bossuet.

"Occasionally, like Joly's philosophical outbursts, they just slip out," said Combeferre who, with a final polish of his one-lensed glasses, gathered his things and left.


End file.
